There I am, naked but for my Marks & Spencer Y-fronts, lights off in the study, late at night, furtively surfing the internet. My wife’s asleep in the bedroom - if I’m quiet, she’ll be none the wiser. I find a particularly naughty website, type in a few of my favourite fetishes and, bang, up pops a filthy little number in north Wales. What I’m offered for my money is staggering. I didn’t think it could ever be that cheap, the saucy little Welsh minx. That’s how I like it: cheap and dilapidated.

I change the search to something a little closer to home. Something of dubious taste comes up. No, no, no, that’s all wrong. That’s nasty. I don’t want anything to do with that. Shouldn’t that be illegal? Some people have no taste. I surf around some more and up pops something I’m already familiar with. My goodness, the neighbour’s on the internet, offering her wares. Who would have thought it? It’s not as if she’s put a sign up outside her house.

I am addicted to porn. Not porn porn. Property porn. Yes, I like looking at other people’s houses on the internet. And I am not alone. With all the gloom about property these days, the last thing you’d expect anyone to be doing is surfing for it online. Apart from masochists, that is. Yet a survey conducted by the hardcore-porn, sorry, property-search website Globrix.com (part owned by News International, parent company of The Sunday Times) found 22% of us spend an unhealthy amount of time looking at properties we could never afford. A bit like Playboy. And a despicable 38% use the internet to snoop at the cost of neighbour’s houses. A bit like Readers’ Wives.

So, will the downturn reduce this obsessive snooping? No. A quarter of respondents said they would be surfing more now prices are falling. The possibility of spotting some bargains - and, better still, the value of the neighbour’s house plummeting - is irresistible. They want their thrills cheap, the reprobates.

I am one of those reprobates. I like to close my eyes and imagine the perfect house. Nothing too ridiculous: five bedrooms, large garden, walled orchard, maybe some convertible stable buildings for ageing parents, early Victorian at the latest, no double-glazing, flagstone floors, working fireplaces, a small paddock for a couple of horses (they can share with the ageing parents), some sort of view of some sort of countryside, and all no more than an hour from the office. As I said, nothing too ridiculous.

Then I start surfing. And I find that perfect house. And it’s three million quid. That’s all I need. Or four if I insist on the working fireplaces. Or two if I ditch the paddock. I think we should be realistic. In which case, I’m only £1.9m short. But that’s okay. I’m still young. Ish. I still buy a lottery scratch card each week. I could still trip on a crack in the pavement and sue the council. Or maybe all these bankers will start jumping off buildings, rather than just threatening, and the market will slump properly. An 80% collapse and I could get a mortgage on that Georgian house on the edge of Tunbridge Wells. The one with the walled orchard.

I continue porn-surfing, but change the location. What if I didn’t have to go physically into work any more? What if my office took an enlightened attitude to people working from north Wales? What if I got sacked for surfing porn sites and managed to find another job somewhere, I don’t know, Hebridean? Or Breton? Good lord, look at that beauty. If we moved to Brittany, we could have an entire run-down chateau. We could rent out one wing to annoying British tourists and still have 14 bedrooms and a lake all to ourselves, for the same price as our three-bedroom semi with postage-stamp garden in Londonish commutersville.

Mind you, le château does need a new roof, which probably wouldn’t be cheap. Nor would relocating the pigeons. And, though we’re terribly, terribly Francophile, I’m not quite ready to abandon the home counties and their free grandparental babysitters just yet. I decide not to run downstairs in my pants and wake my wife to tell her about the porn. I shall wait for the lottery to come in instead.

In the meantime, I’ll check what’s on offer locally. By which I mean, I’ll see what the neighbours are attempting to flog their houses for. A couple of months ago, a “For sale” sign went up on a house around the corner, almost identical to ours, but with a slightly larger garden and a smaller kitchen. Despite the fact that they have terrible “did nobody tell them this is no longer the 1970s?” wallpaper, they’re asking £100,000 more than we paid for ours the year before. One year - £100,000.

In property-porn world, this is exciting and sickening at the same time. It tells me (a) that my house might be worth £100,000 more already, but (b) that the greedy neighbour is almost certainly overcharging, and therefore needlessly contributing to a housing boom that is already, allegedly, over, and therefore (c) making it even more unlikely I’ll ever be able to afford that place in Tunbridge Wells with the pear orchard.

Even more perversely, someone in a street way down the hill - towards the estate, perish the thought - is trying to sell their bungalow for £450,000. What is it with bungalows? Do people enjoy sleeping on the ground floor so much they’d part with nearly half a million pounds for the privilege?

Last week, the house opposite went on the market. Naturally, as a property-porn addict, I went on the net and had a good virtual mosey around. My wife went a stage further. She booked an appointment for a viewing, even though she had no intention of making an offer. It made her feel dirty, largely because the house opposite was not to her liking. Me, I prefer to stick to good old internet-based voyeurism.

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