While reading Jeremy Clarkson’s ‘Born to be Riled’ last night, I was amused to read the following:

Jeremy Clarkson - we've been here before

‘As the 1980s drew to a close, Britain was gripped by a recession which would see car sales fall from 2.2 million a year to just over 1.5 million. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs. Factories closed. House prices plummeted. So did hemlines. It was all horrid. Throughout those dark and gloomy days, gurus told us that the glorious times of easy credit and avarice were over and that in the 1990s we would all be busy gathering wood for pensioners and helping to set up community service projects.

‘But, thankfully, the British recession has ended and those old values are back on line. Girls who had been forced into long and tedious skirts now insist on huge slits up to their ladies’ areas, estate agents are selling houses in Chelsea for £25m, the stock market is up above the ionosphere. Greed is good. And greed is back. Phew.’

Sound familiar? Substitute ‘1980s’ for 2008 and ‘1990s’ for 2010s and Clarkson could be writing about today’s dismal market conditions.

Recessions follow a similar pattern, it is how we get into them that differs each time. In the 1990s an economic recession led to the property collapse. This time a banking crisis has created a property collapse, which might lead to a recession.

It is important not to get too depressed. When markets are booming, it is difficult to think of them crashing, and, when they are bad, the good times seem a distant memory. But all recessions come to an end sometime.

Robert Houston, the new global boss of ING Real Estate Investment Management, likens our situation to being in an aeroplane that is going through the clouds. At some stage it will re-emerge into blue sky. The uncertainty for us, the passengers, is knowing quite when.

Lehman Brothers property analyst Mike Prew this week called the bottom of the property share market, which anticipates a bottoming-out in the direct market in the middle of next year. He suggests the point of maximum pessimism has now passed.

Bearing in mind that his own employer’s financial position is looking rather shaky, I’m not so sure.

But, hang in there. Greed will be back - sometime.

Shoppers visit 'struggling' retailers in Oxford Street

Retail rents fell in July – the first month since 2001 that they have done so, according to the latest CB Richard Ellis Monthly Index.

Is it now time, then, for landlords to ask their retail tenants to pay their rent six months in advance to help with cash flow?

The norm is three months in advance, but retailers want to change existing contracts to monthly to help with their own cash flow problems in a battle initiated by Sir Philip Green and Carpetright founder Lord Harris.

I’m afraid I have absolutely no sympathy for the retailers. They accuse landlords of being inflexible, unrealistic and out of touch. Some, indeed may be, but the major retail property owners are not. They offer a menu of options with new leases and all say that retailers have been most keen to get large rent-free periods and contributions to store fit-out costs and that the rent payment schedule was way down the list.

If retailers want to pay rents monthly on existing leases, they should have negotiated that when they signed the lease.

Last week B&Q property director Terry Hartwell told Retail Week: ‘We are asking landlords to wake up. The market is worse than we’ve seen for 15 to 20 years, therefore now is the time to compromise a bit and try to help retailers with their cash flow.’

It is Hartwell and other retailers that need to wake up. The property market is also in its worse state for 15 years and many landlords are struggling to keep the wolf from the door. The values of their properties have fallen by more than 20% over the last year, which means many will be in negative equity territory.

Property owners and retailers are both suffering. The difference is that property owners are not whinging about it.

For Sale Signs

Take two stories that were published today in the Financial Times and the Telegraph. ‘House prices are expected to fall by almost 30% during the next three years,’ says the FT. ‘Falling output from housebuilders could lead to a 30% increase in house prices between 2009 and 2012,’ says the Telegraph.

The 60% differential is plainly ridiculous. The FT’s source is the prices of residential property derivatives, while the Telegraph’s is the Centre for Economic and Business Research.

If I had to choose between the two extremes, I would plump for the 30% increase. While mortgages are difficult to come by, prices will continue to slide. But, once the mortgage market returns to normal, then prices will once again rise quickly. After all, mortgage interest rates are still historically low – my own is 5.14% (0.14% above base rates) secured only last December with my existing lender, and there is still a nationwide shortage of family houses.

Before the credit crunch began a year ago, the newspapers, if you remember, were full of stories saying there was a huge shortage of houses in the UK and Gordon Brown was making an increase in the development of houses his priority. That situation is now even worse, because far fewer houses are being built this year.

The medium and long-term trend for house prices is up. We are enduring one of those nasty short-term blips. When it will finish, I have no idea, but surely by 2012 prices will once again be soaring.

According to Nationwide Building Society, UK annual house prices are now 6.3% lower than they were a year ago after prices dropped 0.9% in June – which is hardly catastrophic.

I’m a homeowner and, frankly, I don’t much care. If I did want to move house today, then I guess I would sell my house for 6.3% less than I would have got a year ago and I would buy my new house for 6.3% less. In other words, there would be no net change.

Likewise, if the market was still booming, and I sold my house for loads of money, I’d have to pay an equally preposterous price for my new home.

I’m far more concerned with rising petrol, food and utility prices, which involves cash leaving my bank account at an ever increasing rate. Why are these price increases considered bad, while house price rises are deemed good?

OK, refinancing your house and extracting cash can have short-term, selfish benefits, but, truthfully, most of us would benefit from lower house prices. For the rising generation the first rung of the housing ladder is way out of reach and for the more mature, looking to move up after having kids, the second and third rungs are invariably only reached with a pole vault.

I appreciate the current housing crisis is not great for first-time buyers, because they are struggling to get mortgages. But this really isn’t a bad thing, either. Until the credit crunch started, first-time buyers could get away with putting absolutely no money into the price of the house – 100% loans are frowned upon in the commercial world, as they should be in the housing sector.

Today, buyers can still get mortgages that are 90% of the price of the house, which is still a very high level of gearing.

At any rate, the pain won’t last for too long. Thanks in large part to our slow and complicated planning system, only 185,000 new houses are usually built a year. France, with roughly the same population, builds at least double that number. This year there is likely to be only 100,000 new homes built.

Such a low level of supply – particularly of anything that isn’t a city centre apartment – will ensure the recovery in the housing market, when it comes, will be rapid.

a comic book hack

It’s not much fun being paid a pittance by a local paper to cover cat-stuck-up-tree type stories or writing for magazines that appear on Have I Got News For You, such as the one featured recently for collectors of car tax discs.

But the biscuit surely must go to the hacks that have to write about the Olympics in the years leading up to them. There are only two stories to write: they will cost a lot and construction completion will be late.

So, for about three years these hacks will churn out stories saying they will cost a little bit more than when they last wrote. And then for the next two they will say that the construction will be delayed by a few more weeks than when they last wrote.

Today, the story was a cost one. Shock, horror: the estimated cost of the main stadium has gone up by £16m to £525m.

Frankly, I’m looking forward to the games. I think they’ll be a huge boost for London and be great to watch. They are something we Brits should be proud of putting on.

So, does it really matter how many billions they will cost, especially when three-quarters of the money is for the long-term regeneration of the Stratford area.

If the same checks were carried out on where the money that is allocated to the NHS goes as they are on the Olympic Games, then I think we’d be truly shocked. The NHS is waste on a proper scale, not the Olympic Games.

One of the questions I’m regularly asked is which team I shall be supporting in Euro 2008.

Given that I’m English and a football fan and the championship begins on Saturday bereft of British teams, I feel I have to plump for someone.

The Times ran a fantastic feature in its times2 supplement today on this very subject and, like Times journalist David Aaronovitch, I’m gunning for Croatia.

The reason, as it is for fellow Spurs fan Aaronovitch, is that we only have one player in the finals (most of our lot are Brits or Irish), Luka Modric.

Croatia’s playmaker hasn’t actually kicked a ball for us yet, but I’ll be hoping he plays like a dream and Arsenal fans are in envy.

Croatia also has the best strip – the distinctive red and white squares.

A straw poll of my colleagues finds that two are supporting Germany, two Spain, while Austria, Switzerland, Portugal, Holland and, sacre bleu, France get one vote each.

Let me know who you’re supporting by filling in the comments box below.

What guff about John Terry being so brave for taking the crucial penalty.

I’m sure it hadn’t occurred to him that, if he’d scored and won the game for Chelsea, his name would have been in all the headlines.

Actually, what’s even more excruciating is that people refer to him as JT, as if he was a member of a boy band, like Stevie G.

When Giles Barrie, Property Week’s editor and a friend for nearly 20 years, asked me to start a blog, I had my doubts.

A swift search through the internet suggested that every hack worth his or her salt seemed to be churning them out, so why not join them. Yet, once I started to read business-related ones, I realised that many lapsed into either self-indulgence or get-a-life dullness.

Perhaps, that’s the point. Whatever, since it is Property Week that pays my salary and I have no desire to join the ranks of the unemployed, my doubts have been cast aside. Here I am.

In the days, weeks, and, tempting fate, months to come I expect to opine about a broad range of subjects that make me happy (the West Wing, children, living outside London, sushi, Spurs sometimes) and things that get my back up (far too many to mention). Please respond at will.