According to RTE today, rents have reached an all-time high.

I blogged about this last week. It is now almost the same cost in many areas to rent or to buy.

My suspicion (my testable hypothesis) is that fear is now keeping the house prices down. Fear that the prices will fall further and fear that if you buy right now, you will land into negative equity within weeks.

And sure, while prices are not rising, then you don’t have to rush out and buy.

All very understandable.

Also, I spoke last week about the fact that there are people on the daft.ie bulletin board spreading doom and gloom messages.

My suspicion is that they are trying to talk the prices down further, so they can hop in, buy up cheaper properties and then when all the renters finally have to go out and buy and the prices go up again, all these doom merchants start counting the cash once again.

Comments welcome.