With house prices expected to drop between 5% and 10% over the next year, the UK head of property platform Unlatch has insisted the outlook is not “all doom and gloom”.

Lee Martin believes the market has experienced “unprecedented buoyancy” since the pandemic, becoming a seller’s environment and pushing prices to “ever higher false premiums”. Therefore, prices coming down should be seen as “levelling out” rather than a drop.

“A 5% fall in house prices next year would see most of the market’s current over-valuation reversed by December 2023,” he said.

Martin also expressed the view that the new homes market will always “turn on its survival mode in a harder market”, regardless of the climate, citing tools that can be used to help broker a deal such as stamp duty paid, utility bills or service charges paid for a limited time, and government schemes such as HTB and shared ownership.

He added: “Mortgages are slowly becoming more favourable week on week, people will always have a reason to move, be that due to having children, those children getting older and that means the need for more space. Divorce often pushes people to have to sell and buy, FTB’s wanting to get on the ladder, often with help from bank of mum and dad, and even, and not to sound morbid, death of a partner.”

Martin also pointed out that costs to rent are rising and insisted that there will always be investors “snapping up properties to let”.

He concluded: “Property is still and likely to always be the safest investment or asset to turn to… I would always rather have a home than crypto currency personally, but perhaps that reasoning is simply because I understand the property market, and have seen a couple of blips in the market in my 23 years of working within the industry… what goes up must come down… until it goes up again.”