Insults hurled at Cameron who is likened to . . . an estate agent

LONDON CALLING:Buying up of freeholds has become the latest safe-bet investment in property, even if it is a tad dull. Labour, meanwhile, likens Cameron to a car dealer and estate agent, writes ANGELA PERTUSINI

I'M PLEASED TO report that at last there appears to be an area of the property market that does offer some return as well as security. Hedge-fund managers are taking a marked interest in buying up property freeholds and, as the old adage of following the smart money has never been more appropriate it seems, the smartest money (or at least the most plentiful supplies of it) are moving into this area.

Traditionally freeholds have been the least interesting section of the market - the equivalent of putting your money in a post office savings account when all around you are enjoying a champagne lifestyle fuelled by a rocketing FTSE.

Often found lurking at the very back of auction catalogues (several pages after the tired but eminently salvageable little Marylebone mews houses or stucco-fronted Kensington flats), freeholds felt seedy and, in recent years, slightly pointless.

The Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act of 2002 was a very specific attempt to curtail the abuses of leaseholders by freeholders by making it far easier for tenants to group together and buy the freehold.

Perhaps more significantly, it gave them the right to choose their own management company which removed the opportunity to make outrageous service charges and send out dubious maintenance bills - the very things that made freeholds attractive to certain, unscrupulous investors. For several years, owning a freehold has been more a question of time-consuming administration than a path to property millions.

But, while it's true you are unlikely to become rich from owning freeholds, suddenly the slow but steady income they provide from ground rent and genuine management charges has become rather appealing. And the wisdom is that you never know your luck: one of your leaseholders may breach the conditions of the lease seriously enough to forfeit it, effectively handing you a property for the cost of the legal wrangle.

Or, more likely, you might get sudden windfalls from those tenants wanting lease extensions as the tick-tock of the years diminishes their interest in the property - something else the Act tried to simplify and that has become increasingly popular over the past few years.

So dull, yes, but at least not depreciating.

THE biggest political property story of the past couple of weeks has been the UK's housing minister, Caroline Flint, being photographed carrying notes from a meeting at Downing Street on which - with the help of a telephoto lens - it was clearly possible to read that her department anticipated falls in prices of 5-10 per cent "at best" this year. "We can't know how bad [the housing market] will get" the notes went on with discomforting honesty. But I think there is a far greater story that was buried in Labour's defeat at the Crewe by-election in which the party lost one of its safest seats to the Conservatives in a 17.6 per cent swing. Clearly on the defensive, Labour party workers had held a series of focus groups and the London Times reported the contents of a leaked strategy document: in it, members of the focus groups had derided Conservative leader, David Cameron, and compared him to a car dealer and, eek, an estate agent. And not just any old estate agent but a notorious Foxtons estate agent.

I do think that this is one of the most politically brilliant manoeuvres of recent times: take a popular and charismatic figure and associate him with the very worst specimen modern society can drag up. It is almost impossible to think of Cameron now without picturing him braying into a mobile while screeching around in a garish Mini Cooper. A landslide victory for Brown surely ensues.

WE HAD friends staying from America and, inevitably for a property price bore such as myself, the subject turned to the US housing crash. Could it happen here? No, they assured me laughing. In the US, they had been making loans of crazy multiples. My husband and I laughed nervously.

Then there was the fact that they lent to people who had no proven way of making their repayments - just like our self-certification mortgages then? Yes, I suppose, they said reassuringly, but, here was the killer, they offered ridiculously discounted rates for the first couple of years and then stung borrowers when they came out of that period. Sound familiar? Sell now, I tell you, sell.