Those housing green shoots...again

So it's official – the hard-pressed housing market looks like it might just be looking up.
Note the heavy qualification, there – the market has taken such a battering in the past year that big percentage increases in prices and sales would still leave it way off the peak.
Which is probably a good thing. Those heady days of 2006 and early 2007 now seem like a market seized by madness, with crazy mortgages chasing insanely high prices.
So high, infact, that many of the people who bought during the past three to four years are sitting not in a det. des. res. but a roomful of negative equity.
This at least partially explains why there is still a dearth of decent properties coming on to the market in Notts.
So does the uncertainty that has been rolling around the housing market like a fog while we all waited for the banks to get their balance sheets in order.
This is clearing now, though what has emerged from beneath it is a mortgage market which has fewer products and an acute sensitivity to how much you borrow – those Loan To Value ratios.
There is also confusion about prices. They have fallen 15-20% since the market’s peak in 2007, and only in traditionally desirable locations with a shortage of properties is it possible to claw some of that back.
Even there, buyers are reluctant to borrow high.
The other spanner in the works is my regular whipping boy, Home Information Packs.
Chatting yesterday to Graham Lang (pictured), the operations director at estate agency Nottingham Property Services, I discovered that the Government's wizard wheeze of making sellers get their HIPs done before they can sell isn't helping the market one jot.
It's a nasty surprise to people who've been out of the market and don't realise that they have not only got to stump up the best part of £500 before they can name their price, but that they can't go on the market tomorrow.
Infact, they can't even go on the market the day after tomorrow. It's taking more than a week to get HIPs sorted, and the worry is that a bounce in the market could leave solicitors who trimmed back their property teams disappearing under a mountain of HIP-related paperwork, delaying sales still further.
Don't tell anyone, but there is a way round this. If an estate agent knows a property is definitely coming on to the market you can always arrange to casually drop in on those acquaintances who happen to live at that address.
I did just that the other week, discovering far more in conversation than a £500 tick-box document could ever tell me. The estate agent was, of course, very cross indeed with this flagrant breach of an important regulation and slapped me sternly on the wrist afterwards.
Then he passed me the draft particulars...