WITH THE DAYS of making a quick buck on a property punt well behind us, the good people at Paddy Power are offering property junkies replacement therapy in the form of a book on house price changes in 2008.
It's early days yet and around 40 punters have put their money down in online bets on house price changes. So far they seem to be a pessimistic lot indeed with most betting that house prices will decline by over 9 per cent, at odds of 4-1.
Paddy Power is a shade more optimistic and has identified a 5-7 per cent increase as the most likely outcome, with odds offered at 9-4. The next shortest odds of 10-3 are being offered on a 7-9 per cent reduction in house prices.
The bookmaker is offering odds of 12-1 on no change in house prices and odds of 6-1 on any increase at all.
Odds of 4-1 are being offered on a decline of 0.01-3 per cent and odds of 3-1 have been set on a decline of 3-5 per cent.
Sharon McHugh from Paddy Power says that punters are betting €20, €30 and €50. Last year the bets were much larger. One punter put down close to €1,000 and bets in the hundreds of euros were not uncommon.
Paddy Power will be hoping to fare better this year, last year they got it spectacularly wrong, predicting a small rise in house prices. An error that cost them around €25,000.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/6BDEAESQEJH4BHNFRSVZH3W4TM.png)