One of the best ways to judge how much a property is worth is to see what is being asked for similar homes, or how much they have sold for recently. Monthly house price reports from such data sources as the Land Registry and Rightmove are the best tools for this, offering an overview of thousands of homes for sale. However, with the market on hold for the foreseeable future, these indices will take months to offer enough data again. Commentators believe it is particularly difficult to predict whether house prices will fall and by how much because the nature of the current crisis is different to previous downturns we have seen, being caused by global health, rather than economic circumstances.

The 2008 house price crash was in part caused by tough restrictions on borrowing: One of the reasons it was called a credit crunch was because it was hard to get credit, you needed a 40% or 50% deposit to get approved for a mortgage. Combined with higher interest rates, this meant there was more negative equity and a greater number of repossessions, causing house prices to fall, along with a steep rise in unemployment and wage stagnation, leaving many would-be buyers unable to capitalise on cheaper house prices. By comparison, a combination of pent-up demand, which has been building for the four years since the EU referendum, and freely available mortgages at low rates, as well as a fairly even balance between supply and demand are likely to see house price growth settle before potentially returning to the gentle increases seen since December’s resounding Tory general election victory.