Each week the NZ Herald's Cooking the Books podcast tackles a different money problem. Today, it's the forces behind house prices, and what's likely to happen next. Hosted by Frances Cook. If you've paid even the slightest attention to the news lately you'll know house prices have spiraled up past even the most optimistic expectations. It's led to intense bidding wars, buyers offering tens of thousands above asking price just to secure their spot, banks reporting backlogs of mortgage applications … frankly, it's a housing feeding frenzy. Now while house prices are something that makes people feel rich if they already own a place, I do feel for the frustrated first home buyers who struggle to keep up with this flurry of activity. Another issue is that when there's this level of emotive buying in a market, it tweaks my spidey senses. Emotions and money are a bad combination, and can lead to bad outcomes in the end. So how can you make sense of what's going, and what's likely to happen next? For the latest podcast I talked to independent economist Tony Alexander. If you have a question about this podcast, or question you'd like answered in the next one, come and talk to me about it. I'm on Facebook here https://www.facebook.com/FrancesCookJournalist/ Instagram here https://www.instagram.com/francescooknz/ and Twitter here https://twitter.com/FrancesCookSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.