Video report by Lucia Adams

Video: The Bricks Chicks on Eco towns ¦ Video: The Bricks Chicks do luxury ¦ Video: The Bricks Chicks on housing market confidence and commuter hotspots

The latest house price stats

The average asking price for a home in the UK is now £239,521, just 1.3 per cent higher than a year ago, according to Rightmove, the property website.

How to avoid the worst of the property market slowdown

The forecast is getting gloomier, but there are ways for canny buyers and sellers to avoid the worst of it

BACKGROUND

• Who's to blame for the housing market slowdown?

• Housing market: property prices in Britain's hotspots and notspots

• The luxury property market shrugs off the slowdown

• Families at risk of negative equity

Q&A: is there any chance of some good news?

Why do mortgage lenders not want customers? Is it now impossible to get a loan? Will borrowing soon get cheaper?

BACKGROUND

• Video: A good time to invest in property?

• Will the global credit crunch dampen housing demand in spring?

• Country homes in short supply despite slowdown

• Credit crunch: questions and answers

How to fight your way out of a housing market slowdown

Do you have the clout to tough out the downturn? Emma Wells and Lucy Denyer sort victors from victims

BACKGROUND

• The buy-to-let market is thriving, but too risky for most newcomers

• 20 ways to avoid mortgage meltdown

• Recession and repossession: surviving a great fall

• First-time buyers hit as lenders pull plug

Related Links

• Why build if mortgages are off limits?

• The housing market and eco-friendly homes

Rightmove says that asking prices have dropped 0.1 per cent in the past month, a sharp contrast to average increases of 2.8 per cent recorded each April since 2002.

New-build flat prices have dropped 9.4 per cent in the past year, according Bidwells, the estate agency.

House prices across the Bidwells region - Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Suffolk, Norfolk and North Essex - fell 3.8 per cent on average.

Prime property prices around the world rose on average 11 per cent last year, according to the Knight Frank Annual Wealth Report.

The biggest jump in prime property prices was in Antigua (up 40 per cent) but London - at £3,025 per sq ft - remains the most expensive location for top quality homes.

House prices will fall by 8 per cent this year, says Capital Economics in its updated forecasts, and by 10 per cent next year.

Artisreal, the real estate services firm, begs to differ. It predicts a fall of 2.1 per cent across the UK this year and of 0.5 per cent next year. But it hopes that, by the end of 2010, prices will have recovered by 2.4 per cent.

The experts speak

The first priority of lenders is now their profit margins and their crippled balance sheets, not their customers' finances. Although the Bank of England's move will help unlock the money markets, there's no guarantee that homeowners will benefit from the full effect. Even a small reduction in mortgage rates would be a start, but lenders have jacked up their fees to eye-watering levels now.

Nicholas Leeming, director, propertyfinder.com

The move by the Bank of England will raise liquidity and help to promote confidence in the financial markets. However, the scheme does not include smaller building societies and specialist lenders, and we will need to see how the changes affect the pricing of mortgages, which is more influenced by LIBOR. Equally, lending criteria, which have been tightening across the board, may remain unchanged.

Steve Cox, operations director, Spicerhaart Financial Services

There are concerns that lenders might use the opportunity to raise cash that they will then hoard until confidence returns, rather than use it to fund new loans. Many lenders have done more lending in the past few months than they anticipated at the start of the year so are ahead of target and are in no rush to increase volumes. A return to high LTVs and extremely competitive terms looks highly unlikely.

Melanie Bien, director, Savills Private Finance

People really do want to buy houses, but every time there is a change in the housing market scenery people change their mind and a disproportionate number of sales in the pipeline fall through. Last week we felt that we had got some stability back, but this news about the mortgages has broken it again.

James Scott Lee, chairman, Chancellors

Buyers who have saved through the winter and are now emerging to enter the spring market will find that there are deals to be had. It's a buyers' market, but only if that buyer is buying for cash or can put down a good deposit.

Miles Shipside, director, Rightmove

All confidence has gone from the market and so there is no incentive for buyers to move now, unless there are matters of birth, marriages, death or divorce. This state has been brought on by the difficulties in securing mortgage funding, fears of redundancy, the credit crunch, non-domicile tax changes, the cost of fuel, the cost of living - the list is endless. But if Gordon Brown doesn't know what is happening in the economy, what hope do we have?

Linda Beaney, Beaney Pearce, Chelsea

April, May and June are the prime selling time for estate agents, so what happens in the next three months will set the tone for the rest of the year and possibly even 2009. I hope that this will be the most painful year, as the market undergoes a correction, and I would not be surprised if we see house price falls of 5 to 10 per cent.

Robert Godfrey, Bidwells, Northampton

Times recommends

• Second homes: credit crunch casualty or money-spinner?
• How I built my own sliding house
• Top 10 incentives for house buyers