With Christmas looming, it might seem odd to add “selling a house” to your to-do list — especially if you have two daughters aged five and one. But Shelley Landale-Down knew exactly what she was doing when she and her husband Graeme, a designer, put their threebedroom house in Sevenoaks, Kent, up for sale earlier this month, after having had their offer accepted on a larger property in the same street.

“There aren’t many houses similar to ours available in our area,” says Shelley, 34. “Come spring, there’ll be an influx again, but now there’s not so much competition.” And she was right: only five days after their property went on sale at £319,950, the couple were offered £310,000 by cash buyers looking for an investment — which they accepted.

The usual rules of the housing market have been turned upside down in the months since the credit crunch became part of our life. Traditionally, people would buy in spring or autumn — and by now would be devoting themselves to Christmas shopping. Not this year.

“The market is much more active than it normally is at this time of year,” says Liam Bailey, head of residential research at Knight Frank estate agency. “Buyers want to get on with their lives after renting for 18 months or so, and right now they can fix in a very good deal on mortgages.”

Nick Chivers, an associate at the agency’s Cheltenham office, agrees. “We are very busy: one house that came on earlier this month at £475,000 had 84 viewings in one week,” he says. “A lot of people have been paying quite a lot of rent at the same time as not earning much interest on their capital, so their equity lump is being eroded, and that’s partly what’s driving the demand.”

It’s the same story in other parts of the country. Nicola Oddy, based in Cornwall for the house-buying agency Stacks, has also been unseasonably busy. “There are easily twice as many houses in the £750,000-£1m bracket on the market as there usually are at this time of year. And they are selling.

“Many of these are people who rang the agents to prepare for selling next spring and they have been advised to sell now instead. The buyers are out there. If a house has something a bit special about it, it’s going to sell. This is a ‘pay what it takes’ market for the right thing.”

All of which means that certain buyers — those who know precisely what they want and aren’t prepared to compromise — are having a difficult time. Knight Frank, for example, has a family on its books who have been looking for more than a year for a townhouse in Cheltenham priced at up to £1m.

Alicia Iveson, 24, a would-be first-time buyer who works in advertising, has been looking for a flat in London since April. Her parents are helping with the deposit, and she wants to spend up to £360,000 on a two-bed property, with underground parking and a balcony, near London Bridge. “It sounds a lot, but in London you don’t get much for your money,” she says.

She did find exactly want she wanted, but at the last minute the owner, a developer, decided to hang on to it for himself as an investment. “There’s a huge shortage of new developments and it’s just been an absolute nightmare,” she says. “I guess I’m looking for the wrong thing at the wrong time. There’s nothing on at the moment.”

It’s this dearth of property on the market that has persuaded the owners of Heybridge Mill House, a Grade II-listed, five-bedroom Georgian property, near Maldon, Essex, to put it on sale now.

Nettie Firman and her sisters, Rosie Findlater and Bunny Farnell-Watson, inherited the rambling house, which stands on a two-acre island surrounded by the River Blackwater, a mile from the sea and 40 minutes from Liverpool Street station, from their parents.

The property, with its secret gardens and smugglers’ tunnel, won’t look its best until spring. But the trio, who have been clearing out, rewiring and decorating the house since their mother died in April, are not prepared to wait for green shoots, horticultural or otherwise. It is on sale for £875,000, through Savills (01245 293233, savills.co.uk).

“The choice down here in this bracket is a bit lean at the moment and we don’t know what the market will do next year,” says Firman, 50, an artist. “We don’t want to wait in case it gets any worse.”

Will it it get worse? The market, which started to fall in 2007, has certainly shown a remarkable recovery in much of the country over the past few months, fuelled by both shortages of supply and record-low mortgage rates. There has even been a reappearance of phenomena such as gazumping, normally seen only in boom times.

In the more affluent parts of London popular with overseas buyers, demand has been boosted by the weakness of the pound against the euro. Increasing numbers of Italians, in particular, have been spotted in recent months; Chelsea appears especially popular.

However, while most analysts agree prices cannot continue to rise so fast without creating another bubble, opinion is divided as to whether the market will flatten out or crash again, in a “W” rather than “V”-shaped recovery.

Rightmove, the property website, reported last week that asking prices fell 1.6% between October and November, the first drop in three months. This still leaves them higher across most of the country now than they were at this time last year — with the exception of the north and the east Midlands, which are down 0.6% and 1.6% respectively. Prices in the southeast, by contrast, are 3.8% higher. Miles Shipside, the site’s commercial director, expects further falls before a tentative recovery in the early spring, although he believes this might peter out amid pre-election jitters.

FindaProperty, another website, has warned of “a growing risk of a double-dip housing recession”, while Savills, the estate agent, has predicted that prices may fall again next year, by an average of 6.6%.

Bailey agrees that concern about the future is a big motivation for buyers. “People are nervous, the ‘double dip’ is a real factor in the market,” he says.

Waiting game

Try telling Gillian Powell that now is a good time to sell. “I’m hunkering down for the winter and waiting for things to start moving again in the spring,” she says. Powell, 51, who sits as a lay member of an employment tribunal, has become stoic about the vagaries of the property market. Since she put West Bowmont House, her five-bedroom property near Wooler, Northumberland, on the market two years ago, she has had about a dozen viewings — but only one offer, which fell through after several months.

Powell, who has given up on the search for a replacement property for the time being, knew her home, a converted chapel set in rolling countryside, was never going to be snapped up quickly. “It’s a very unusual house — a love-it-or-hate-it type of place,” she says.

However, she didn’t expect it to take as long as two years, even though she had to put things on hold when she suffered a serious illness last year. “There’s just no explanation for it, except that the right person hasn’t come along,” she says. “We live in hope.”

Barbara Pentecost, her estate agent, is more pragmatic. “One problem is that it’s semi-detached,” she says. “People don’t expect to see a property of that size and price in the middle of nowhere, but with a next-door neighbour. It’s been a big sticking point for a lot of people.”

Nevertheless Pentecost, who sent out 130 sets of particulars for the property, has not advised Powell to drop the price, still £450,000. “The rooms are massive and it’s a gorgeous house,” she says. “The price really isn’t unreasonable. If I could, I’d buy it myself.”

West Bowmont House is for sale through Smiths Gore, 01289 333030, smithsgore.co.uk

What does 2010 hold for the housing market?

Savills: The nationwide estate agency forecasts price falls of 6.6% in the mainstream markets next year, with the smallest drops and strongest subsequent recovery in London, the southeast and south.

Knight Frank: Prime London and country-house markets will continue to show modest price growth of 3%, according to the top-end estate agency, but the mainstream market will be subject to similar price falls.

Assetz: Overall house prices are likely to continue to increase by about 5%, but with downside risks, says the property investment firm. Poor housing supply will underpin prices in the face of substantial demand.

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