The UK Housing Market’s Dangerous Illusion: Why Today’s “Recovery” May Be a Bull Trap

Over recent months, headlines have begun to declare that the long‑predicted housing crash has been “cancelled”. Asking prices in several key commuter belts around London have nudged back up to all‑time highs. Estate agents are circulating upbeat market reports, suggesting that anyone who does not buy now risks “missing the bottom” forever.

On the surface, these claims appear supported by data. The UK House Price Index shows that, by late 2024, average property values were modestly higher than a year earlier, with annual price inflation of around 3% and an average UK price close to £290,000–£292,000 asperofficialstatisticsforautumn2024. Yet this modest nominal growth is occurring against a backdrop of the highest interest rates in more than a decade, a cost‑of‑living crisis, and a mortgage market that has visibly cooled.

Taken together, these conditions suggest that something is badly out of alignment. Beneath the seemingly benign headline numbers, multiple indicators point not to a healthy recovery but to a precarious, engineered phase in the market cycle – the classic shape of a “bull trap”, where prices briefly rise, encouraging late‑stage buyers in just before a more profound correction.

This article unpacks the mechanics of this trap, drawing on transaction data, rental trends, institutional behaviour, and structural features of the UK housing system. It also brings in wider evidence on volumes, interest rates, and landlord behaviour to place the narrative in the context of 2023–2025 data. The picture that emerges is deeply troubling for first‑time buyers and highly leveraged landlords alike.

Price Without Volume: A Market That Looks Alive but Is Barely Breathing

The public conversation about housing is dominated by prices. If prices are rising, the market is judged to be strong; if they falter, talk turns to crashes and crises. Yet price is only half the story. The other half – often invisible in the headlines – is volume: the number of transactions actually completing.

In a genuinely healthy market, rising prices are supported by strong volumes: many buyers and sellers transacting at broadly similar price levels. When prices rise while volumes fall sharply, however, it signals something else entirely: a thin market, where a relatively small number of deals at higher price points skews the averages.

Recent official data confirms that transaction volumes remain materially lower than in the pre‑pandemic period. HM Land Registry and HMRC figures for 2023–2024 show that volumes fell markedly in 2023 (HMRC reported around a 22% fall in transactions that year), and while there was some rebound in 2024, recent UK HPI releases note that processed volumes for the latest months are still lower than historical norms UKHPIguidanceandstatistics. Provisional data for mid‑2024 showed substantial year‑on‑year falls in processed Land Registry volumes for England and Wales, even as average prices ticked slightly higher.

This divergence matters because a market with severely reduced liquidity is easy to distort. When only a small fraction of properties are selling, a handful of high‑value or over‑priced deals can drag the “average” upwards, even if the vast majority of stock is languishing unsold or repeatedly reduced.

Imagine a street of ten similar houses. Nine sit unsold for months. One sells because a cash‑rich buyer, overseas investor, or corporate landlord is willing (or incentivised) to pay over the odds. The recorded sale price lifts the average, Rightmove’s indices register a rise, and observers conclude that “the market is recovering”. Yet the lived reality on that street is a frozen market punctuated by anomalous sales, not a broad‑based upswing.

Tracking specific listings in large cities and commuter towns reveals the same pattern on a wider scale. Many properties remain listed for eight months or more without selling, particularly in parts of Manchester, Birmingham and East London. Then, in a single postcode, there may be a sudden cluster of sales agreed within 48 hours, frequently at or slightly above asking price. This is highly unlikely to be the result of organic buyer behaviour, which is typically staggered and idiosyncratic. Instead, it looks like short bursts of institutional buying – funds, corporate landlords or other professional investors entering in clusters, setting or reinforcing a price floor.

In a thin market, these bursts are powerful. They support a narrative of resilience and recovery which can be amplified by media outlets and estate agents, even as overall liquidity remains historically weak.

Banking Balance Sheets and the Need to Avoid a Crash

Why might such institutional capital be deployed in this way? One answer lies in the banking sector’s exposure to property‑backed debt.

Since the financial crisis of 2008, banks have been required to hold more capital and undertake stress testing. However, they still carry large portfolios of mortgages – not just on owner‑occupied homes but on buy‑to‑let and commercial property. If official price indices fall far enough, many of these loans risk slipping into negative equity, where the collateral is worth less than the outstanding debt.

Industry figures and former risk analysts suggest that, for a significant slice of commercial and buy‑to‑let lending, a fall of more than around 10% from current valuations can trigger loan‑to‑value covenants. When these thresholds are breached, banks are often contractually entitled – or obliged – to demand additional collateral or recall the loan.

In the present context, banks neither want nor can afford a mass recall of such debt. Capital buffers, though improved since 2008, are not designed for a sudden wave of crystallised losses in a high‑rate environment. Repossessions, firesales and write‑downs would damage balance sheets and investor confidence, inviting regulatory scrutiny and potentially destabilising the wider financial system.

This creates a powerful institutional incentive to prevent or at least delay a visible “crash” in published price indices. One route is to restrict the flow of new mortgages to only the most creditworthy borrowers, keeping aggregate lending growth subdued while headline prices remain artificially high. Another is to facilitate or encourage cash‑rich entities – funds, build‑to‑rent operators, REITs, family offices and foreign buyers – to absorb stock at elevated valuations, especially if those buyers have longer‑term horizons or alternative funding sources less sensitive to current mortgage rates.

The end result is a market that appears to be holding up, with modest year‑on‑year price growth in official series, even as volumes remain subdued and a significant proportion of would‑be transactions never reach completion.

The Ghost Market: High Fall‑Through Rates and Down‑Valuations

A striking feature of the current phase is the high rate at which agreed sales collapse before completion. Data from conveyancing software providers and industry surveys indicate that fall‑through rates – the percentage of agreed sales that fail between offer acceptance and completion – have risen dramatically, with some estimates pointing towards nearly half of all agreed sales failing in certain periods.

The primary culprit is down‑valuation. Estate agents and sellers may agree a price based on an optimistic reading of market conditions. Buyers secure a mortgage in principle. But when the lender’s valuer visits the property, the survey may return a lower valuation, reflecting more cautious internal risk assessments, comparables at reduced prices, or concerns over quality and future saleability. The bank then revises the maximum loan downward, leaving a funding gap the buyer cannot bridge. The sale collapses.

This process creates what might be termed a “ghost market”. In portals and public data, properties appear as sold subject to contract, supporting the illusion of brisk activity and firm prices. Yet a large minority of these deals never complete. After a delay of several months, the property reappears on the market – sometimes at the same price, sometimes quietly reduced, sometimes withdrawn from mainstream portals and offered off‑market.

The result is a further disconnect between apparent and actual liquidity. Headline asking price indices and optimistic agent commentary obscure the reality that a large proportion of attempted market exits are failing at the final hurdle.

Rents as the Trigger Mechanism: “Cheaper to Buy Than Rent”

While sales volumes stutter, the rental market has become ferociously tight in many regions. Over the past three years, private rents have risen far faster than wages, particularly in London and larger cities. The Office for National Statistics has repeatedly reported record annual rent increases, with growth in the private rental index outstripping pay growth for much of 2022–2024.

Landlords facing higher mortgage payments – due to the sharp rise in interest rates from 0.1% in 2021 to above 5% by late 2023 – have passed much of this cost on to tenants. Many buy‑to‑let mortgages that were fixed at very low rates are now resetting vastly higher, increasing monthly costs by hundreds of pounds. Those who can raise rents are doing so; those who cannot are often selling up.

This feeds a pervasive media and social narrative: that rents have become so punitive that it is “cheaper to buy than to rent”. Friends and relatives repeat a familiar line: “Why pay your landlord’s mortgage when you could pay your own?”

For would‑be first‑time buyers trapped in house‑sharing or struggling with rent hikes of 20–30% over two years, the argument is emotionally compelling. Even if the purchase price feels inflated, the prospect of escaping the rental sector’s volatility and insecurity creates a powerful psychological driver to buy “anything, anywhere”, as long as it is theirs.

This desperation is precisely what supports the bull trap. High rents make over‑valued purchase prices look relatively palatable. Mortgage brokers can frame payments that are only slightly above current rent as “good value”, especially if marketed through schemes that stretch terms to 35 or 40 years in order to reduce monthly costs.

In economic terms, the rental squeeze acts as a forcing mechanism, nudging marginal tenants into owner‑occupation at the worst possible point in the price cycle.

Foreign Capital and Pockets of Hyperinflation

Overlaying these domestic dynamics is a further distortion: the influx of foreign capital into prime and new‑build developments. Analysis of Land Registry title data for large projects in London, Manchester and Leeds indicates that a substantial proportion of units in certain schemes – sometimes more than 60% – are sold to overseas entities, including companies and individuals based in Asia, the Middle East and tax‑efficient jurisdictions.

These buyers often pay cash and are relatively insensitive to UK mortgage costs or short‑term yields. For some, UK property functions less as a home or income‑producing asset and more as a store of value or “safety deposit box”, a way to diversify wealth out of more volatile or politically risky jurisdictions.

This demand creates pockets of hyperinflation in city centres and fashionable districts, driving up the nominal average. However, it does little to improve the situation for ordinary British households, who compete not for the glossy tower blocks but for the older stock and modest family homes.

When national indices report that “UK house prices have risen”, they blend together these hyper‑inflated, often mortgage‑free sales with the far more constrained domestic market. Strip out the cash buyers and corporate transactions, and the picture for mortgage‑dependent households is far bleaker: weak demand, stretched affordability, heightened risk of negative equity, and growing distress.

Land Banking and the Manufactured Housing Shortage

The UK’s chronic undersupply of new housing is well‑documented. Government targets have frequently spoken of 300,000 homes per year in England alone; actual completions have repeatedly fallen short. Population growth, migration and demographic shifts have all contributed to sustained pressure on the existing stock.

Conventional wisdom suggests that when prices are high, developers should be incentivised to build aggressively. Yet examination of construction start data for late 2023 and 2024 reveals a counter‑intuitive trend: in some regions, housing starts have not just slowed; they have collapsed.

This apparent paradox disappears once one recognises that the largest listed housebuilders are not, in practice, simply “in the business of building houses”. They are increasingly in the business of land arbitrage: acquiring land at one price, holding it through the planning process, and then releasing finished units at the highest achievable value while preserving their 20%+ target profit margins.

This model relies on “land banking” – stockpiling plots with planning permission. Major developers hold hundreds of thousands of such plots at any one time. They could, in theory, build quickly and in large volumes, easing the shortage and applying downward pressure to prices. Instead, they carefully manage “absorption rates”: the speed at which new stock is released into local markets.

If too many homes are built and listed simultaneously, local supply swells and prices soften. To avoid this, developers “drip feed” phases. One estate may have infrastructure and roads in place for a second or third phase, yet large areas remain fenced off. Building is paused not due to capacity constraints but to wait for local prices to tick up another few percentage points, maximising revenue per unit.

This deliberate throttling of supply transforms what might be a manageable housing shortage into a structurally embedded feature of the system. Buyers and politicians are told that Britain “just doesn’t build enough homes”, when in reality the ability to increase supply exists, but the commercial logic of land arbitrage and margin protection dictates a slower release.

Affordable Housing Promises and Section 106 Erosion

Alongside the volume issue is the question of what type of housing is being supplied. Section 106 agreements – legal obligations attached to planning permissions – are supposed to ensure that a proportion of new units in large developments are “affordable”, whether as social rent, affordable rent or shared ownership.

Politicians frequently cite these obligations as evidence that they are forcing developers to contribute to mixed communities and meet housing needs. However, the reality on the ground is often different.

Developers routinely submit “viability assessments” arguing that providing the agreed level of affordable housing would render the project financially unviable. These documents often deploy complex accounting assumptions to inflate projected costs and depress projected sales values or profits. Under‑resourced local councils frequently lack the expertise or political will to challenge these claims robustly.

In practice, affordable quotas can be dramatically reduced in the negotiation process: from, say, 35% of units to 15%, 5% or, in some cases, effectively zero. The ultimate outcome is developments that are overwhelmingly comprised of premium or luxury units, priced far beyond the reach of median earners.

This then forces the squeezed middle class to compete for older, less efficient stock – Victorian terraces, 1930s semis, ex‑council housing – bidding up the prices of these finite assets. It is a pincer movement: the top of the market is dominated by units designed for wealthy domestic and overseas buyers; the middle is squeezed into an ageing stock of homes that become ever more expensive relative to income.

Build Quality, Warranties and the New‑Build Trap

If high prices and constrained supply were at least buying quality, the situation might be more defensible. Instead, widespread anecdotal and documented evidence suggests that build quality in many new developments has deteriorated significantly.

Owners of recently completed homes have reported serious structural and safety defects: leaking roofs within weeks of moving in, poorly installed plumbing leading to sewage ingress, missing fire‑safety barriers in cavity walls, and rapid deterioration of finishes and fixtures. While some level of snagging is expected in any new property, the volume and severity of defects reported in some developments indicate systemic issues rather than isolated failures.

Warranty providers and insurers tasked with backing these properties are reportedly inundated with claims. Rising build and materials costs, combined with the pressure to protect developer margins against cost inflation, have incentivised corner‑cutting. On paper, the properties may tick the regulatory boxes; in reality, the risk of long‑term problems is being transferred to purchasers.

For a buyer stretched to the limits of affordability, unforeseen remedial works, prolonged disputes with developers, and the possibility that a property becomes stigmatised due to known defects can be financially and emotionally devastating.

The Service Charge and Estate Management Fee Time Bomb

A further, often hidden, dimension of risk lies in the legal structure attached to many new‑build homes. Historically, buying a freehold house meant straightforward ownership of the building and land, subject only to council tax and normal maintenance costs. Increasingly, however, even freehold houses on new estates carry estate management charges.

Because many local authorities are fiscally constrained, they often decline to adopt roads, green spaces and play areas in new developments. Developers then transfer management of these communal areas to private companies, often ultimately controlled by offshore or opaque ownership structures. Purchasers sign contracts committing them to pay annual management or service charges for estate maintenance.

At first glance, these fees can seem modest – for example, £200 per year. The sting lies in the contractual wording. Many agreements permit the management company to increase charges annually in line with “reasonable costs”, with no explicit cap and limited transparency over how costs are calculated. Historical examples suggest that such charges can rise severalfold within a few years, leaving owners facing bills of £1,500–£2,000 a year or more.

Failure to pay can carry severe consequences. Management companies often have the right to place a legal charge over the property, block sales, or pursue court action. In effect, owners find themselves in a quasi‑feudal relationship with a private entity that wields leverage over their supposedly freehold home.

For some, this has become a trap. Prospective buyers’ solicitors increasingly flag onerous management clauses as “toxic”, advising clients not to proceed. Existing owners may discover that their home is technically worth far less than local comparables without such liabilities, as the pool of willing purchasers shrinks.

Thus, even where headline prices in a development have risen, individual owners may be unable to realise those gains in practice. They are, in effect, prisoners of the legal and financial architecture attached to their property.

Policy, Lobbying and the Priority of Asset Prices

All of these structural issues – land banking, viability games, feudal service charges – raise an obvious question: why has regulation not closed these loopholes and rebalanced the system?

The uncomfortable answer is that the UK’s political and regulatory environment has, for decades, prioritised the stability of property prices and the profitability of major developers and lenders over genuine affordability for ordinary households.

Major housebuilders and large landlords are among the significant donors to mainstream political parties. Industry lobbying groups exert substantial influence over consultations and white papers. Analyses of draft policy documents and green papers have found language strikingly similar to that in industry publications, suggesting a close alignment between commercial interests and official thinking.

Successive governments have been explicit about their fear of a sharp house price correction. Since property values constitute a large share of household and bank balance sheet wealth, any rapid fall risks undermining consumer confidence, tax receipts (via stamp duty and related levies), and financial stability. As a result, state interventions have repeatedly aimed to support demand – through schemes like Help to Buy, stamp duty holidays, and shared ownership – rather than to tackle structural inequities on the supply side.

Help to Buy, for instance, allowed first‑time buyers to purchase new‑build homes with small deposits supported by a government equity loan. In practice, a significant portion of the subsidy capitalised directly into higher new‑build prices and developer profits. Independent reviews and parliamentary committees later concluded that the scheme had inflated prices and provided poor value for money compared with alternative uses of public funds, such as social housing investment.

New iterations of support – longer‑term mortgages, mooted “Help to Buy 2.0”‑style schemes, and targeted guarantees – risk repeating the same pattern: enabling buyers to borrow more against inflated assets, thereby stabilising or lifting prices in the short term but entrenching unaffordability and systemic risk in the long term.

The Squeezed Landlord and the Emerging “Shadow Inventory”

For two decades, buy‑to‑let investing was a cornerstone of many middle‑class financial plans. Doctors, teachers, small business owners and other professionals often acquired a second or third property as a quasi‑pension, betting on rising values and rental income.

In recent years, however, the policy and economic environment for small landlords has turned hostile. Key changes include:

• Section 24 of the Finance Act, which phased out the ability of individual landlords to deduct mortgage interest from rental income for tax purposes, effectively taxing turnover rather than profit.
• Additional stamp duty surcharges on second homes and buy‑to‑let purchases, increasing acquisition costs.
• Proposed Renters’ Reform Bill measures, including the abolition of “no‑fault” Section 21 evictions and stronger tenant protections, altering the risk‑return profile of letting.
• Tighter Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rules, with future minimum standards likely to require many older properties to be upgraded at significant cost if they are to remain legally rentable.

Analysis of EPC data suggests that a substantial share of the UK’s rental stock – often estimated around 40% – would not meet proposed future efficiency standards without material investment. Retrofitting a typical Victorian terrace to achieve target EPC bands can cost upwards of £10,000–£15,000, depending on property condition and local labour rates.

Layered on top of sharply higher mortgage costs and tax changes, many small landlords have concluded that the numbers no longer stack up. Rather than pour capital into upgrades or accept lower net yields, they are exiting – or attempting to exit – the market.

This landlord exodus shows up in several ways:

• Rising numbers of “no chain” properties in listings (often indicative of owner‑occupiers or landlords selling vacant stock).
• Increased volumes of ex‑rental properties in auction catalogues, where sellers seek rapid disposals.
• A shift in the composition of sales towards previously rented stock in certain postcodes.

This is the “shadow inventory”: a large pipeline of properties which are likely to come to market over the next couple of years as landlords sell up, but which may not yet be fully reflected in mainstream indices. In some areas, no‑chain or ex‑rental sales already constitute the majority of new listings.

When a million landlords try, over a relatively short period, to pass their properties to a smaller pool of potential buyers, the usual outcome is price compression – particularly for the modest terraces and semis that ordinary buyers actually want, rather than the premium new‑builds favoured by developers.

Developers can restrict new supply; individual landlords, facing mounting costs and tighter regulations, have far less control. When they need or decide to sell, they must accept what the market will pay.

Localised Crashes Behind National Averages

National indices can give the impression of calm. A 2–3% annual change, whether up or down, seems unremarkable compared with the double‑digit swings of previous crises. Yet these aggregates mask substantial regional and local variation.

Evidence from portals and regional agents indicates that certain locations – particularly those that experienced extreme pandemic‑era booms – are now seeing price falls far steeper than the national average. Coastal towns in the South East, such as parts of Hastings and Brighton, which saw an influx of buyers in the “race for space”, have reportedly experienced widespread reductions, with many listings cut by more than 10% from their initial asking price and still struggling to attract bids.

Short‑let and holiday‑let markets in those areas have also become saturated. With Airbnb and similar platforms drawing in large numbers of speculative investors during the boom, many local micro‑markets are now oversupplied. As yields compress and occupancy rates fall, investors are offloading properties back into the regular sales market, often under financial pressure.

Commuter belt towns such as Chelmsford and Reading, once perceived as almost risk‑free bets due to their rail links to London, are also vulnerable. The combined effect of high mortgage costs, increased rail fares, and evolving working patterns (with some employers mandating a partial return to the office but not always five days a week) has undermined the previously unquestioned premium attached to these locations. Instances of substantial reductions – for example, a four‑bedroom house cut from £600,000 to £525,000 and still unsold – reflect a recalibration of buyer willingness to pay.

The overall national picture is thus a patchwork: pockets of nominal growth driven by high‑end and foreign‑funded transactions, set alongside quiet or not‑so‑quiet localised crashes in more ordinary segments of the market.

Interest Rates, Swap Markets and the Fragility of the “Mini‑Recovery”

The apparent recovery in 2024 has been assisted by a modest easing in mortgage rates from their mid‑2023 peaks. While the Bank of England’s base rate sat around 5.25% for much of 2023 before edging down slightly, competition between lenders and expectations of future cuts allowed fixed‑rate mortgage deals to edge lower.

By late 2024, average two‑year fixed mortgage rates were in the mid‑5% range, down from near 6% a year earlier. This small improvement, combined with slightly softer inflation, helped to restore a degree of buyer confidence, contributing to the uptick in sales volumes seen in some datasets e.g.estimatesofaround1.1milliontransactionsin2024reportedbysomemarketanalysts.

However, mortgage pricing is heavily influenced by swap rates – the rates at which banks borrow from each other over fixed terms. When market participants decide that inflation is likely to remain persistent, or that central banks will keep policy tighter for longer, swap rates rise. This in turn pushes up the cost of fixed‑rate mortgages offered to consumers.

Periods in which swap rates fall or stabilise can generate short‑lived “mini booms” as lenders cut rates and pent‑up demand is released. Yet if swap rates subsequently rise again, lenders withdraw cheap deals and the fragile improvement in affordability evaporates. In a market as stretched as the UK’s, such oscillations can be enough to trigger or end brief surges in activity – without resolving the underlying issue that the ratio of prices to incomes remains historically high, and that real wages, though recovering somewhat, have endured a lost decade.

Real‑terms analysis shows that UK house prices, adjusted for inflation, have already fallen by double digits from their pandemic‑era peaks. But because much of the adjustment has happened through inflation eroding the real value of nominal prices rather than via large cash price drops, many prospective buyers do not experience this as improved affordability. Deposits are still large in cash terms, monthly payments are meaningfully higher than in the 2010s, and cost‑of‑living pressures eat into savings.

The Human Cost of Negative Equity and Why Patience Matters

For an individual household, the central risk in buying at or near the top of an over‑valued market is negative equity: owning a home that is worth less than the outstanding mortgage. In such a position, a sale cannot clear the debt without additional capital. This severely constrains choices.

Being in negative equity means:

• One cannot easily move for work or family reasons without crystallising a loss.
• Remortgaging to a better rate may be impossible if the loan‑to‑value ratio exceeds lender thresholds.
• Life events – relationship breakdown, ill‑health, redundancy – become harder to navigate, as housing flexibility is curtailed.

Negative equity is not just an accounting entry; it is a lived constraint that can strain relationships, mental health and long‑term financial planning. Households may feel stuck in properties that no longer suit their needs, paying elevated interest rates when others benefit from cheaper deals.

Historical experience from the early 1990s and post‑2008 period suggests that those who delay buying until after a correction can save not just money but years of working life. A 20–30% difference in purchase price translates into tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds over a 25–40 year mortgage term, potentially affecting retirement age, children’s opportunities and resilience to future shocks.

First‑Time Buyers: Targeted as Exit Liquidity

In the current configuration, first‑time buyers are the prime targets of multiple overlapping incentives and narratives. Government schemes, lower‑deposit products, shared ownership offers, upbeat articles about “rising confidence” and relentless “now is the time” messaging all funnel towards the same outcome: converting renters with savings into mortgage‑holders at valuations that suit the exiting seller – whether that is a landlord seeking to offload a tired rental, a developer keen to hit sales targets, or an institutional fund rotating out of under‑performing assets.

Buying now, at a point where nominal prices have stabilised but structural pressures are building, entails a very real risk of acting as “exit liquidity” for those parties. The seller realises their profits from prior years of price appreciation; the buyer assumes the long‑term debt obligation and exposure to further corrections.

Analyses of cyclical corrections in housing markets suggest that nominal peaks and troughs can be separated by several years. If, for instance, real distress peaks in 2025–2026 as more fixed‑rate mortgages reset, landlords confront EPC deadlines, and economic growth remains anaemic, those who entered near the 2022–2024 plateau may find themselves significantly under water by the time broader price falls become visible in official indices.

A System at an Inflection Point

The UK housing market sits at a complex inflection point. On one side are powerful forces determined to maintain the appearance of stability: banks seeking to avoid crystallised losses, developers wanting to protect margins, governments deeply wary of any event that could be labelled a “crash”. On the other are accumulating pressures: overstretched households facing remortgage shocks, landlords squeezed by tax and regulatory changes, and a generation of young adults for whom standard metrics of affordability bear little resemblance to lived reality.

The recent uptick in headline prices and volumes should not be mistaken for a robust, organic recovery. Rather, it bears many hallmarks of a late‑cycle bull trap: a period in which prices are propped up through a combination of institutional activity, constrained supply and psychological pressure on marginal buyers, before underlying fundamentals reassert themselves.

For those contemplating their next move – particularly first‑time buyers – the most important asset may not be a specific property but patience. Preserving cash reserves, maintaining a strong credit profile, and monitoring not just prices but volumes, repossessions, auction results and rental trends will be crucial.

The gravity of economics cannot be defied indefinitely. Interest rates, incomes, and the real capacity of households to service debt ultimately dictate sustainable price levels. When that gravity reasserts itself fully, the distinction between those who bought under duress in the bull trap and those who waited could amount to a decade of financial freedom.

In a landscape dominated by reassuring headlines and vested interests, scepticism is not pessimism; it is self‑defence.