There must be times when economists wish they hadn’t invented “seasonal adjustment”.

You could almost hear the groans emanating from HMRC when they were number crunching residential property transactions for last month.

Did they go up, down or both?

Well, take your pick.

On a “provisional seasonally adjusted” basis, there were 100,220 residential transactions, about the same as November, and 0.4% lower than December 2013.

On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, though, there were 106,950 residential property transactions, up nicely from November’s figure of 100,420 – and on an annual basis a 2.3% improvement.

A plea from Eye to all those commentators filling our in-box with your expert observations: please could you comment on the actual figures, not those that are massaged upwards or downwards, depending on the time of the year.