According to a Reuters’ poll, it will take more than a year for house prices in Ireland to start rising steadily and the risk to that forecast is towards further delay as soaring unemployment diminishes the pool of potential buyers.

According to the poll, a dozen economists expect house prices to fall by -10% this year and to drop another -5% on average over the whole of 2010. Seven of those economists went into more detail, with a consensus forecast that house prices, already down by as much as -40% since it peaked in early 2007, will bottom out next March. Prices would then embark on a steady upward trend from June 2010, according to the median forecast of the seven Dublin-based economists.

As Ireland’s small, open economy is caught in the middle of the global credit crisis at the worst possible time in its domestic economic cycle, risks to housing market performance still appear to be on the downside. As the property market stabilises, Ireland will also need to end its over-reliance on the construction sector as the source of economic growth and budget revenue, analysts said. The commercial property sector, whose rise and fall has left banks with billions of Euros in loans they don’t expect to recover, could take even longer to revive.