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The housing market may just be on the turn - The Times

What goes up must come down. But the opposite is also true, at least in finance and economics.

While individual companies, share prices and investment portfolios can collapse and disappear without trace - as is all too obvious to former shareholders in Northern Rock, Lehman and Chrysler - this never happens to entire economies or financial markets. That is why a relatively sanguine approach is likely, in the end, to pay off for anyone with the patience and wherewithal to ride out the ups and downs of the crisis. Nowhere is this truer than in the most cyclical, but ultimately most reliable, of financial markets: residential property.

As panic at the end of capitalism ebbs away, with banking systems and economies clearly stabilising, at least outside Japan and continental Europe, confidence seems also to be returning to housing markets - with the exception of certain markets, such as the Irish Republic and Spain. In Britain, recent signs of recovery in the property market include an increase in transactions, although not yet in prices, a big rise in mortgage applications and the most positive monthly report from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors since January last year