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Q. When will house prices go up?
A. This is a difficult question to answer and will differ area to area.
Nationally, homes are worth 46% less than they were in 2006 and in Dublin the fall is as high as 51%.
In the premium end of the market - places like Ballsbridge where trophy homes went for up to €57m - prices are down even further.
But because there is so little trading in the market, it is difficult for economists to predict a lift in value anywhere.
And the market is so flat, the effect is there is no premium in the market for anyone, even for those trying to sell in previous des res areas.
An ESRI report in 2010 predicted that first-time buyers (with 90%, 95%, 100% mortgages) would be in the red for 10 years. This is based on property prices in 2010 being 30% lower than they were in the peak at 2007.
If the drop by the end of the year was as much as 50%, and it is close to it, as many as 350,000 homeowners could end up in negative equity, according to the ESRI’s policy paper ‘Negative Equity in the Irish Housing Market’.
"First-time buyers with a high loan-to-value ratio will not move back into positive equity until after 2020," the report says.
Economists such as Morgan Kelly in UCD say the negative equity trap could exist for even longer. He reckons it could be 10 years (starting from 2008) for house prices to start showing significant gains again.
Ireland's property market is still dysfunctional
Marian Finnegan, economist at estate agent Sherry Fitzgerald, explains that the percentage of homes on sale in any market is a good indicator of market sentiment.
The international standard for a 'normally behaving market' is that six or seven per cent of total housing stock in a market is on sale.
In Dublin in the late 1990s - a time when the housing market was considered 'normal' - the amount of stock for sale was about two and a half per cent.
The latest six-monthly survey by Sherry Fitzgerald says that just 1.7 per cent of stock in Dublin is on the market - around half of levels in the late 1990s.
But in places like Cavan, Leitrim and Roscommon as much as six or seven per cent of all homes are on sale, reflecting the glut of empty properties and ghost estates in those areas. This is likely to depress house prices in these areas for some time to come.
Q.When will interest rates rise?
A. The truth is they already have gone up although experts, at the end of 2010, say the basic tracker rate is unlikely to go up for at least another six months.
Irish Nationwide became the sixth lender to increase its mortgage interest rate in August after hiking the rates it charges those on standard variable mortgages.
Rates rose by 0.54%, adding around €30 to the monthly repayments on every €100,000 borrowed, or €360 annually.
