THERE'S so much scaremongering going on at the moment, that if we're not careful we're going to talk ourselves into a property crash.

If we're to believe last Monday night's programme 'Future Shock:

Property Crash', house prices will drop between 30 and 50%. They talked about property crashes in other countries, but what they didn't say was that the UK had a property crash in 1990, and anyone who stayed in the market recovered completely within one to two years. You have to have some balance when you look at these things.

And if you look at the recent report from the Department of the Environment, on the Irish property market between 1975 to 2005, you see the patterns that form. The 1970s wasn't that great and the '80s was very depressed, but in 1976 house prices in Ireland rose by 24%. In 1977 they were up 18% and 22% the following year, and again in 1979 they went up 31%. So in that four-year period house prices in Ireland rose far more than they have in the last four years.

In 1985 prices dropped, but were back up by 1988. Property is a cycle and that's the way it goes.

You hear a lot about negative equity, and people are all starting to worry about the value of their homes. But if a house was valued at 400,000 last year, and it's valued at 380,000 this year, what difference does that make to the average person who lives in that house? For them it's a roof over their head, a home, not just a value on paper. And regardless of what your home is valued at, what really matters is the mortgage and if you can afford it or not. The value of your home might be rising, but if increasing interest rates bring the mortgage up, it doesn't matter what it's valued at. Rising interest rates are actually more of an issue than house prices.

The interesting thing about interest rates is that as they fall, rents also fall, and as interest rates rise, rents rise, so while investors may feel the pinch from rising interest rates, they're actually achieving better rents at the moment. The other thing to think about is for many people who bought homes a few years ago, even if prices drop, the homes are still going to be worth more than what they paid originally. And most of the price softening is in the mid-price range, so it's not going to affect the first-time buyers. And if stamp duty is addressed with the next government, then that will stabilise the first-time buyer market.

We in Ireland are still building and that's the sign of a healthy economy. The trouble is that people are like sheep, and no-one wants to stand out as the maverick, so it's very possible that we will talk ourselves into a property crash.

Some commentators have been saying that there's 2000 unoccupied houses around the country, which is a sign of an impending crash. That's absolute nonsense. Those houses are holiday homes that people don't want or need to rent out, which in itself is a sign of a booming economy.

And don't forget that Dublin house prices have only been catching up with other European cities in the last few years. After all you can still get a property for 350,000 a few miles from the city centre, whereas there are lots of other capital cities where you couldn't get that.

Talking about a property crash makes for great TV and the media love it, but it's important to look at the facts and not the fiction.