Property mania leaves most out in the cold

One of the most intriguing advertisements I saw in this paper last week was in the property supplement. It featured properties "only 70 minutes from Dublin" and there was a dramatic and colourful picture of a river bordered by high-rise apartments. Not Navan (or even Nobber), not Drogheda or Ardee, but London!

For those of you with more money to burn than can be usefully occupied in the rampaging Irish stock market, or our own hyperactive property market, London beckons. You can do the opposite trade to the one that has been done so often before instead of living in Dublin and commuting weekly to London, you can buy yourself a nice riverside apartment (prices starting under £100,000 what are the chances of that in Dublin when apartments in the IFSC are being quoted at £145,000) and commute to here. And there are probably plenty of people who would be happy to spend a mere 70 minutes getting to work.

Property has been on my mind lately. There's been a constant stream of cars up and down my quiet suburban street for the last few weeks because there's a house coming up for auction. The road where I live isn't anything out of the ordinary - unfortunately I'm not the sort of person who can look at a decaying pile of rubble and sigh "oh yes, peach will look perfect once we've put the walls back together" - so I didn't buy a bijou artisan cottage in Dublin 4 10 years ago and hand it over to builders and architects for a year before moving in. Pity really, I could now be sending my column from the beach in Barbados on the proceeds.

Thankfully, we haven't been subjected to the kind of traffic jams that have built up around properties that are considered "prime", which seems to be anything on the south side of the city with four walls that are standing. If it has a garden anything bigger than a pocket handkerchief then add another hundred grand.

But there certainly has been an increase in the number of people walking casually up the road and stopping, equally casually, outside the house to make an appraisal. And there's something unnerving about carrying an armful of shopping up the driveway in full view of the prospective buyers while they look at you and wonder if you're the sort of person who might play Meatloaf in the early hours. It was probably a bit off-putting for them, though, to see the builder fixing the roof on my house! Anyway I guess as much as anyone I want to see the house go for a decent amount of money, but I really and truly do feel sorry for anyone who's starting out on the rocky road to home ownership right now. And particularly sorry for anyone who doesn't want to live in a large development of architect-designed luxury homes on the edge of a motorway.

The subject came up over dinner at the weekend when we met some friends in a chinese restaurant. Our conclusions (arrived at after three bottles of wine) were that stamp duty on second-hand houses should be abolished for first-time buyers and that, even at today's prices, property is still a good investment. But so are equities. . .

According to stories, JP Morgan is supposed to have said that he knew the time to get out of the equity market was when the shoe-shine boy started to exchange share tips. I hope it isn't the same when it comes to waiters in Chinese restaurants!

Of course, both the property and equity markets are surging ahead because of the holy grail of monetary union which will bring lower interest rates and more affordable borrowing.

I remember when I was buying my house the manager of the building society told me that I should work out how much I could afford if interest rates were at 12 per cent. Even though, at the time, they were closer to 9. It was the complete opposite of today's approach and I suppose it did mean that in the dark days of the early-1990s currency crisis, when rates shot through 12 per cent, I could still afford the mortgage.

But most people now are borrowing on the basis that rates can only come down. Perfectly understandable when short-term German rates are around 3.5 per cent, while ours are still more than 6.

So, at the moment, property is just one of many asset classes for investors and it makes things that much more difficult for anyone who is just looking for somewhere to plant an apple tree and plumb in a washing machine.

On the continent, where there is less of a home ownership culture, people are much more likely to invest in companies than bricks and mortar, but it's not like that here and, right now, for all the people struggling to find the money for their first house there are many others still looking at the property market as a sure fire investment.

There are other ways. The screens were abuzz with stories that Warren Buffet, one of America's best-known investors, has bought up around 20 per cent of the world's silver supply and could be sitting on a notional profit of around $200 million £145 million. You would need to buy a lot of houses for that!

If you're more into bonds than bullion how about the next round of music industry bonds? Following on the success of David Bowie who collected around 50 million on his bond issue, securitised by future royalties from his albums, more music stars are thinking about going down that route.

Apparently, though, you have to have been around a while which is why Oasis and the Spice Girls aren't considered good bets just yet. Still, if you're a Spice fan who's missed the housing market you can wait for them to bring an issue and buy up a chunk of Spice Bonds instead. Well, why not, they have endorsed just about everything else!

Sheila O'Flanagan is a fixed income specialist at NCB stockbrokers.