PROPERTY UPDATE: MY VIEW:ANY suggestions that there's been an "uplift" in the market are really just hopeful thinking. They may well be right – and let's hope so – but it's just educated guesses due to the lack of information out there.

This lack of information is a huge problem for Irish property professionals. Not even the Government knows how many vacant units are in the country, and if they don’t know the basics, well then how can they begin to formulate policy for property and its markets?

The nearest thing to housing trends analysis are produced by academics from places like DIT and Maynooth.

This lack of national information over the last 10 years allowed an unending series of claims to be made about property markets, especially by politicians, which were irrefutable due to a lack of evidence, but were also fundamentally flawed and plain wrong.

We don’t need that again. Providing any real outlook for the property market, six months or six years down the line, is incredibly difficult when there are no national figures and trends available to analyse and and provide advice to clients.

It shouldn’t be beyond us to do this.

There has been a fall off in the numbers of students wanting to study property economics and related subjects such as quantity surveying.

But just because the markets are depressed doesn’t mean that there aren’t work opportunities; a strategic-thinking young school-leaver might see this as a prime moment to begin four years of study and upon graduation begin working in what will probably be a very changed property market in Ireland.

New skills within the property professions always emerge in response to changing circumstances, and we see this now in places like London with the rise of the specialist distressed assets manager – essentially someone who finishes off bankrupt developments on behalf of the banks or investors.