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“This petition asks the Government to change the investment rules for self-administered pension schemes to allow them to invest in residential property. This will benefit pensioners whose investment income has been hurt by the reductions in interest rates, by allowing them to invest in property which can be let at a higher yield. This will also help to stem the continuing loss of value in the property market, and stimulate activity.”

Please see ‘12 ways to kick-start the property market’ for more information on this issue. (To read this e-book, click www.barrettssolicitors.co.uk and then select E-BOOKS.)

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If you can only get 1% or less in a deposit account, buy-to-let seems like a good bet again. I’m told that yields as high as 7% to 8% have been achieved on properties bought at auction. Even if you don’t buy at exactly the bottom of the market, it wouldn’t really matter if you are buying as an investment. You’ll be congratulating yourself on having got a decent income.

Buy to let mortgages still seem to be hard to find, and they’re not attractive when you do find them. Mortgage rates for buy-to-let are being offered at rates above 6%. On top of that, you may have to pay a fee up front of anything up to 3% of the loan in order to get a fixed rate.

Bradford and Bingley used to be the main buy-to-let lender but it seems that they are now so keen to get out of that market that they are trying to encourage customers to remortgage by waving early repayment charges.

So it may not be a market you can get into if you need a mortgage. But if you have cash, it seems to me that it may be a good market to be getting into at the moment.

There was an article in the Telegraph earlier this week which said that Knight Frank has calculated that prime property in London lost 10% of its value in the last three months of 2008. They also said that prices have dropped 22% from their peak for £1 million to £5 million properties since August 2008. But surely August 2008 wasn’t the peak of the market! Perhaps the Telegraph has misunderstood. It is easy to get confused because I certainly don’t understand what any of the figures which get published day by day really prove.

To start with, I don’t know when exactly the top of the market was. In that same article the Buying Solution said that they go back to autumn 2007 to establish what a property was worth at the top of the market, and then reduce it by 20% to get a rough figure for what the property is worth now.

What I don’t understand is how they do this calculation. How do you compare properties? It’s not as if properties are like stocks and shares where you can compare values at different times for the same share. You can’t compare prices for the same property. So if you have a lot of different sized houses in different quality streets going at different times, how do you work out how much overall they have dropped in value? I am mystified, to be honest. I suspect even the people doing the calculations are mystified, because everyone seems to come out with completely different figures every time I look at the Press.