Another year and another plethora of property prophets telling us "how it will be for you". As landlords know more about property than desk-based twiddlers, I read their banalities rather like the psychology student who tumbled into bed with a fellow student and afterwards demanded: "How was it for me?"

We go on reading these gurus addictively, even when our instincts tell us they are depositing loads of bull's manure.

Any landlord knows these futurists are playing off a severe handicap of not owning a property portfolio.

Therefore, they cannot know, on the ground, what is happening and instead have recourse to dry statistics, which they bend to their - or their employer's - prejudices.

So, surprise, surprise, we have "economists" from estate agents predicting not enough houses being built in 2006, in a crass attempt to pressurise planners, who are trying to curb the runaway urban sprawl.

Not enough new homes coming on the market? How about vast swathes of the midlands commuter belts, with streets and streets of new Legoland lying empty for most of 2005? And very likely to remain empty in 2006 . . . So where is this "pressing need" for new houses?

Only in the greedy minds who fear the property boom has peaked. The fact is, the boom has peaked. It began around 1989 and lasted until 2005.

Along the way, the "economists" predicted it would end in, say, '95, or '96 or 2002. Or in whatever year they were paid to scan the client's crystal ball.

Some are in denial, such is the extent of their error, and walk away when you wave a cutting with their name on it . . . "Not me, Guv" their body language says, as another case of "economic prediction" bites the dust.

They blame "de meedja" who gutted their (wrong) predictions for an easy headline.

A tired sub-editor trying to make sense of ponderous analysis which examined the ratio between incomes and property prices, struck a headline - "property crash!" - in turn exploited by radio programmes because property replaced sex as the topic that sent the post-Catholic Irish into conversational overdrive.

Before Christmas, the native ESRI, in common with the "foreign" Economist Intelligence Unit, discussed the hazards of the country's dependence on property. Very few landlords, I imagine, subscribe to the Economist, but in another life I had reason to, and my impression is of them getting it repeatedly wrong on a few matters I knew something about.

Towards the end of last year, the ESRI, a collector of statistics, warned that the country's over-dependence on the construction sector was building negative equity.

Well shiver me little goolies for stating the obvious, but any "over-dependency" is likely to produce a "negative" in time. Unless, of course, some corrective is applied. The "correction" the ESRI had in mind was a property tax.

My attention dissipated with the speed of a Frank Connolly answer because such a tax is a recipe for social and financial chaos. Especially in a country where the building that housed the only all-island parliament in College Green has window space still blocked-up, 200 years after a bright spark had the idea of taxing windows.

Since then many other taxes have fallen by the wayside, most recently another Bacon report, when TDs found the pressure of mammies wailing that little Deirdre and Patrick could not afford that famous "first step on the property ladder" because investors were buying up stretches of new houses.

Using Bacon to get the mammies off their back, a naive government imposed a heavy tax on property for rent. Lo and behold, Irish money went overseas, leaving the mammies wailing that Deirdre and Patrick could not even get a place to rent. So that tax was scrapped.

All of which leave me with a piece of landlord wisdom to impart. Yes, the market has settled, yes the boom is over, yes a reasonable normality has returned, where supply about matches demand.

So there is no need for malicious tinkering by gurus, futurists or - save the mark - "economists".

Could they all not go away and save Africa, get their mug in Time magazine and leave the rest of us "fumbling in the greasy till"?