If this poll of over 600 votes from irishhousepricesfalling.blogspot.com/ is anything to go by, market sentiment is a changing fast.
Where did that poll come from originally?
What site was it hosted on like?
Oh for God’s sake. i know that this site is essentially for property bears but this is ridiculous. Ths poll was on the ‘housepricesfalling’ site. Hardly representative of the general population. Publicizing this as a relevant and real poll is as bad as anything that has been published talking up the market by the VIs in the last few months. I thought that we were above that and went for reasoned analysis only.
Care for some green tea, Gearoid? 
It’s a thread, anyone can start a thread, this is a forum and is only as authoritative as a forum can possibly be (i.e. not very), just because someone mentions something on the property pin this doesn’t confer incredible weight to the statement.
All advice, posts, comment on the internet needs to be taken with a huge pinch of salt by those trawling the net and using the info…
As to whether anyone is better than anyone, I really don’t know.
Thanks for letting me know where that poll came from! Cheers!
Just one further comment, I staunchly believe that this is a real and relevant poll. But it is important to understand where the source data is coming from.
All things are a matter of judgement.
Sorry mate, bit of an over-reaction. Work stress = venting.
you still got a point…
if i hold a poll with myself, then 100% will think downtown crash coming…
its hosted on a bear site…
it has no real creedence if this is the case, it doesn’t reflect general sentiment
Well to be honest I thought over 600 votes was actually a good deal of voting traffic and can heardly be acounted for the regualr 20-30 bears who roam these here parts.
It compares well to polls on RTE which sometimes only have over 1200, just consider the volume of traffic that must go to RTE!
For example todays poll has over 700 votes (not a red hot topic I agree) rte.ie/comments/garda_prot.html.
SO to be honest if each of those votes is a different, unique IP then I think its very valid. So far the internet has shown itself to be more accurate than anything the large media are able to throw at us and in many cases 6-12 months ahead of the game.
So as far as internet polls go I think its completely valid.
Sure the big commercial stat houses only use a sample group just over 1000 mark with a +/- 3% margin for error, this is seen as efficently representative.
In your judgement baby_tooth, which is perfectly valid, I would personally think that it relects a level of general sentiment and it’s important that the outputs are caveated in that way.
No problem gearoid and no apology necessary in any case! 
ohh i don’t know,
we cant control the sample so therefore we can’t make any inferences on it, not being awkward, and being a bear myself, would agree with it, but having exp in stats and knowing that we pick holes in what bulls say with regrads to reports and so on, it should apply to us as well, least we suffer from the hypocrisy that we accuse them of, thats why i would urge caution in drawing too much inference upon this.
or to be sad and technical, we can not infer a significant relationship or granger causality and may infact be looking at a spurious
There are two issues here.
One is whether the poll result is representative of public sentiment. It may well be.
The second is whether or not it has any scientific value. It doesn’t - no two ways about it.
I agree.
I never specifically stated it was scientific, I didn’t even set the pol
l up. However I reckon its READ HOT anecdotal and both are truly important in terms of diagnosis of a very sick economy but much worse social structure.
Disease is not always manifest on the outside, so the doctor must consider the varying symptoms combined with their scientificly aquired knowledge to clarify the matter at hand.
Nothing like a good old forum BLOW UP 
i hear ya
…
agree on sentiment changing, we all agree about that, and all markets are about sentiment…just ask fama or bernstein or even the illustraious benjo graham…
its time for us to sit back and watch major economic history unfold…not nice or pretty but it does have macarbe appeal to it,…
Comical Austin will return with his New Year assessment tomorrow. Hopefully if he makes it onto Newstalk someone like Jill Kerby will be there to bring some balance
*Tomorrow Austin Hughes, chief economist in IIB Bank, will present a generally positive forecast for the Irish property market in 2007.
Mr Hughes told the Sunday Independent yesterday that he expects a soft landing and that the slowing-down evident since autumn is merely a temporary blip in the market*