Serious Money: Perhaps it should have come as no surprise, but the response I received to the most recent Serious Money piece about property was immediate and came from a wide number of sources.

That article suggested that if anyone had a 100 per cent asset allocation to property they were to be congratulated on their investment returns but advised to diversify their risks. The reference to the 100 per cent portfolio weighting in real estate was not meant to be taken literally, but was merely a device to remind people that putting all your eggs in the one financial basket is rarely a good idea.

There is a strong sense that many Irish investors, for obvious reasons, have an awful lot of their wealth tied up in some sort of property. Of course, anyone who has put all their money into the property basket has done very well. If anyone has earned more money than the real estate investor in recent years, they are probably being investigated by the Criminal Assets Bureau. Given this, it would be tempting to think that all those financial advisers who witter on about the benefits of portfolio diversification can safely be ignored.

Indeed, although it is early days yet, 2005 is shaping up to be yet another year when property, particularly of the domestic variety, trounces the returns from equities and bonds. Trying to persuade someone to reduce the scale of an obviously winning bet is a thankless task.

I knew all of this would be a difficult sell, particularly the bit about diversifying now, just when it looks like mainstream asset classes are starting to struggle.

I was quite taken aback, however, by the number of people who contacted me to confirm that, yes, there are plenty of investors with 100 per cent of their money in bricks and mortar and, more surprisingly still, there was universal agreement that the moment for diversification has finally arrived.

The psychology of investors never ceases to fascinate: without an obvious catalyst, a very disparate and unconnected group of people had come to the same conclusion. It's time to scale back the property bet. I'd like to think my article was the spur, but these investors seem to have reached the same investment conclusion independently.

None of the people who contacted me were professional investors. They had large, sometimes very large, sums of money in real estate. Their investments were mostly Irish, with a smattering of UK properties.

Having reached the decision to diversify, they were looking for advice in a number of areas. First, they wanted to know how much of their property portfolios they should sell and, second, what to do with the sale proceeds.

As I am probably not allowed to give such advice to individuals - quite rightly, there are all sorts of rules and regulations governing such activities - I suggested the obvious route of seeking professional, qualified help. Almost invariably, my correspondents expressed great reluctance to go down this path. Different people had different reasons but costs, prior bad experiences and mistrust of large banks were often mentioned.

Now, I don't know how typical my experience has been. The vast majority of Irish investors may well have diversified portfolios and be extremely happy with the financial advice they are getting from their chosen provider. But it has been an education for me to discover just how many people are fully invested in real estate, want to diversify and are terribly unsure about the best path to take.

This type of investor may, or may not, be in a tiny minority. Whoever they are, they believe that they are being ill-served by the investment community.

It might simply be that the increase in personal wealth in this country has happened so quickly, and is of such a scale, that the existing institutions have yet to catch up. Their product offering may be more than adequate and their advice perfectly sound but they simply haven't expanded sufficiently to cater for the growth in the market. This might explain why foreign private wealth managers have been eyeing the Irish market.

Whatever the reason, there is more than a hint of suspicion that there is a reasonably large cohort of investors out there who are looking for good, impartial advice and are willing to pay for it. But they don't know where to look. An economist would call this a form of market failure.

The advice given in my earlier article remains the same: diversification is always a good idea. Of course, it would be wrong to advise anyone to divest themselves of all, or even the majority, of their property investments.

Indeed, the way things are looking in equity markets right now, it is tempting to suggest that a move out of property into stocks later rather than sooner would be in order. But asset allocation should never be confused with market timing. It is hard to get either one right, next to impossible to get them both right at the same time.

It is always difficult to buy equities when they are falling but, with hindsight, that is often exactly the right thing to do.

Global stock markets are going through one of their regular moments where they doubt the growth outlook and worry that every glass is half empty. The optimist in me sees such events as buying opportunities. Equities may take a while to recover their poise but I am willing to bet, on a five-year view (that is always the minimum investment horizon for any stock market investor), they will be a better returning asset class than property.

Chris Johns is an investment strategist with Collins Stewart. All opinions are personal.