Not a downturn, just a wobble - so no need to panic

LondonCalling:Those who have seen booms and slumps in the property market over the years have learned not to panic, writes Angela Pertusini

IT'S AN irksome feature of being a commentator that you want to be the first to buck a trend. So, while prices raced away in London earlier this year, the papers were full of naysayers such as myself, assuring everyone that the four horses of the apocalypse - debt, negative equity, repossession and homelessness - were galloping towards us over the horizon.

A run on a bank and serious gloom from every statistician later, we are now queuing up to say that it's a mere wobble and what's everyone panicking about?

The reason I have yet to panic is that these tremours in confidence seem to come along every 18 months to two years and, indeed, the latest commentary is that house price growth has slowed down to its most sluggish since May 2005.

This date chimes well with me because it was, of course, the last time I tried to sell a property - 16 months and four tortuous offers later, we finally got rid of it just in time for the next surge.

But can anyone else remember the slump of 2005? Or the slowdown of 2003 (that time I had just bought)? Or the downturn of early 1999 (again, I was selling at the time)?

Now I wonder if these stutters aren't so much corrections as a chance for everyone to catch their breath and get used to the sheer stupidity of the money needed to buy a property in London.

And Edmund Conway, economics editor of the Daily Telegraph, and chief jeremiah, seems to concur. He has spent the past nine months preaching doom and damnation on homeowners but, in his latest dispatch, concedes that, as far as he can tell, the slump, when it comes, will be a freeze in prices rather than an all-out crash.

He bases this, rather gallantly, on his perception that British lenders have behaved in a more gentlemanly fashion than their US counterparts; clearly he hasn't met any of the brokers offering my feckless friends eight-times salary mortgages.

The one thing that will ensure that the boom lives to frighten our pants off yet again is investor confidence. I've never been completely convinced by the government's commitment to make us a nation of homeowners. If they were so keen, where are the major, affordable building projects being pushed through central London, rather than the dreary estates being built where no one wants to be?

More importantly, why not put some reins on the runaway market - punishing taxes for the buy-to-letters, fines for those, such as international business people holding onto pièd-a-terres and wealthy families buying up the Cotswolds, who keep homes empty for more than three months a year, raised stamp duty for second-home owners?

With the effective doubling of the inheritance tax threshold (up from £300,000 (€431,000) to £600,000 (€863,000) for married or civil partnership couples) plus the slashing of capital gains tax (CGT) in the past few days, what clearer signal could the prime minister and chancellor be sending than it is OK to hoard property? Now CGT is one of those taxes where you almost definitely have to call in a very well qualified accountant to calculate but roughly it came in at 40 per cent after a current annual exemption of £9,200 (€13,200). That will be cut to 18 per cent from next April which makes owning investment properties altogether more profitable and attractive.

The mooted sale of the BBC Television Centre in Wood Lane, west London, has come as a shock to those of us who have its postcode (W12 8QT) engraved on our consciousness from the endless competition entries from Blue Peter and Saturday Swap Shop. It's hard to imagine the place the complex holds in the nation's affections, the scene of everything from Roy Castle launching a record-breaking tap dance marathon to newsreader Nicholas Witchell sitting on a lesbian who had broken in and interrupted the early evening news.

Or, indeed, its vast, overweaning ugliness. Its sheer size is said to make the site worth £200m (€288m) and, as the BBC gets on with some number-crunching, it has become the latest victim of cost-cutting with a sale likely in the next five years. If any of you own a property in Hammersmith, Acton or Shepherd's Bush, I would start to think about taking advantage of Mr Brown's CGT cut soonish.

Although there will still be some BBC activity in the area, the whole point of Shepherd's Bush seems to have been to act as a dormitory for the BBC's White City empire and, as far as I can tell, has little else to offer. Unless you can find tenants with a deep hunger for litter, traffic snarl-ups and late-night pandemonium courtesy of the neighbourhoods concert venue, then start looking elsewhere.