"It is painfully obvious the role that lax lending standards, ridiculous tax policies for investors (negative gearing), the media's pump and dump coverage and low interest rates are playing in skyrocketing prices.
"Australians are now leveraged to the hilt on property and the proportion of debt to income is at its highest. In addition, almost 50 per cent of new loans for property purchases in Australia are now to investors, indicating significant speculative activity," Welch said.
"This will no doubt lead to a significant correction when interest rates inevitably rise, rental yields fail to keep up with the pace of repayments and capital gain is non-existent because purchasers bought at the top of the market.
"The problem is the expectation and belief that property will always go up. No one seems to remember the downturns, the GFC, the cuts to wage growth. My general feeling is that in the case of Australia, and probably New Zealand, too, governments will intervene and interfere to keep prices and growth reasonably stable over the long run," he said.
David Tzimenakis said the Irish economy was heavily dependent on British and American buyers.
"When the bubble burst, the US property investment ground to a halt, and exactly the same with the UK.
"Also, a major difference is that the Irish economy was being propped up by property prices, with very few other markets, other than financial services, as an export," he said.
"The New Zealand economy has withstood effective recession in Australia and a dip in Chinese growth. There may be a housing price drop, but it certainly won't be a crash of anywhere near Irish proportions, the same factors simply aren't there.
"While UK housing construction and sales crashed on a national scale, London's property market continued to grow, fuelled by Chinese buyers, exactly the same as here.
"Also, one huge difference with Ireland is that houses were being built for nobody to live in. Whereby in New Zealand it is demand driven.
"What will hopefully happen in New Zealand is a slow, steady evening out of house prices. Investors can withstand a levelling of the market. Fortunately, a huge amount of the investors are foreign, therefore not using bank loans, and unlikely to cause a financial crash, for not continuing loan payments," he said. "The Herald has really produced a dud with this one, and ignored all of the biggest factors of the Irish crash."
Diana Ines Perez said the media and real estate agents had to take full responsibility for the property downfall in many countries in the Americas, Spain, Britain and Europe and she agreed with Gaynor.
"I witnessed some of these disasters first hand and can testify that what I was reading in the newspapers in 1992-98 in Spain about property prices, I now read in New Zealand publications," Perez said.
"I urge you to keep on pressing on this issue, please, to save a lot of young people from losing all their savings."
Andrew McEwan said New Zealand was nothing like Ireland.
"Firstly, only Auckland and Christchurch housing is increasing. Many regions have actually gone backwards. Ireland relied on speculative buying not occupier demand," McEwan said.
"Ireland relied on special tax incentives that brought huge multinational corporations to base there. We don't have anything like that, so when the GFC hit, Ireland suffered from multinational pullback."
