Thank you all for your interest. A little smug, but as I said, those are the things I shan't bother saying at dinner.

Victor, and if there is no capital appreciation for a while, e.g. 1975-1978, 1980-1983, 1990-1996...? I'm early middle-aged, thanks for asking. I hear that property is doing spectacular things in Spain

Richard and Danny Boy, If you buy a house for X, pay off a bit of the capital and sell for 3X, you gain about 2X. That is about typical for the last 10 years. Banks haven't started writing off house loans here yet.

Richard, I didn't claim to have been clever, but 4 times!, jolly well done to you (or as you say, bon chance). We did count the cost of moving, but luckily somebody else paid for it (relocation package). I'll be in Philly during March, perhaps we could have a dinner party? As said, I promise not to talk about property.

Jugoya (beautiful name - are you Japanese? I love it there). Right apart from the bit about Mother's ruin (odd glass of Bordeaux perhaps).

Joan Brooks, Tunbridge Wells,

This can only be good news for people in this country who have been forced out of the property market by prospectors.

The explosive unregulated growth in BTL investment has inflicted the most damage on UK society in a generation. When people have the opportunity to own their own home then communities are able to flourish. When investors buy up large percentages of property in a particular area and scoop over inflated rents from tenants then communities are effectively destroyed. Landlords add nothing, neither morally, socially, or financially to the areas in which they invest.

Why hasn’t the government introduced substantial tax increases on rental income?

Alan, Inverness,

What you summarise there is just the final episode in a heinous inflationary situation with damaging effects on millions of people now priced out of property.

I think the dinner parties you are describing must be smug, hello darling, sparkly champagne events for morally unpleasant and selfish people.

That 12 months is just the last of approximately 96, when house prices spiralled viciously out of control. Now it finally seems to be stopping, not with very much help from the hand-wringing Bank of England, and I hope your dinner parties in the next 12 months will be full of doom and gloom. That doom and gloom concerns greed, and a profit you should never have had.

Shame on you people for writing this stuff, after 8 years saying the situation was terrible and needed redressing.

Now, finally, with little thanks to the B of E and more to do with the US economy, it is being redressed.

Joe, Manchester,

Oldasiahand: no smile will be wiped off my face, sad though that will be for you. I bought my house in 1978 and own it outright. You probably couldn't afford to buy it even were I to wish to sell. And when I paid £30,000 for it all those years ago, plenty of smart arses came forward to remind me of negative equity after the Heath/Barber boom, and to assure me that my house would never, EVER be worth more than I paid for it,. Sorry to spoil your orgy of schadenfreude. Sometimes the 'great unwashed' are smarter than old asia hands.

Dectora, London, UK

Joan. Middle aged, middle class and with a penchant for mother's ruin. Getting off the property ladder is always far easier than getting on. I have no feelings for your comment other than pity.

jugoya, Oxford, Great Britain

No Joan - your are not vulgar - just smug - the worst of British traits. And typically smug people think they are more clever than they really are. You are the perfect example. So you only doubled your cash out since 1996? That's not very good. Many have trebled since then (I have actually quadrupled on one property since 2000 ). But unlike the smug I know that this is down to luck and not anything clever on my part.

And now you've sold! Have you counted the costs of selling and then buying again? Property prices would have to fall at least 5% to make it worthwhile. And in good areas that is unlikely to happen. So happy renting!

Richard, Philadelphia, USA

So Joan, you're saying that you've been paying over three times what you do now every month, yet only made twice as much money? That's almost Brownian economics....and yes it's vulgar.

Danny Boy, Skövde,

The great unwashed British public, who have forgotten the lessons of 1974-5, 1981-83 and 1989-94, are about to have a religious experience: negative equity! It will wipe a few smiles from faces that assumed prices only ever go one way. My guess is that it will be a protracted slowdown of 3-5 years as the economy struggles with stagflation. A 25 percent drop in prices combined with a13-15 percent increase in salaries will bring average prices to 5 times coombined family salaries from an absurd 7 today.

oldasiahand, Guildford, UK

I don't know what to say; the dinner parties we go to, no-one speaks of property prices. I know we live in lowly Somerset, and have mud on our boots, and mud in our halls, but where did it go so wrong for us?

Jeremy Poynton, Fromeville, 51st State

Ah! yes Joan Brooks but you have forgotten the long-term capital appreciation and how it sets off againt you rent - how old are you?
I can't believe I asked that.

Victor M., Malaga, Spain

Don't forget that in November we learned that "...some people are already looking beyond the slowdown, trying to spy out the locations that could be the first to start moving upwards again."

Onto your topic of dinner party talk, I would love to bore the pants off every one telling them how I bought our family home in 1996, sold this April (trousering 2 times the original price as cash - now in Euros and Yen) and am renting a much larger house for about 30% of what I would have pay in interest only for the same house.

But I am not really that vulgar.

Joan Brooks, Tunbridge Wells,