Carol Tallon Talking Property: The news that 30 per cent of buyers are those trading up is great - releasing houses into a market short of stock.

Over the last year or so, the proportion of cash buyers in the Irish marketplace peaked at 57 per cent. This was, relatively speaking, the highest level of cash-only transactions in decades and was not entirely unexpected given the scale of the global credit crunch.

However, the mortgage market has now moved on, and it was recently confirmed that mortgaged buyers, principally home-buyers, accounted for two-thirds of all residential transactions for the second ...