The OFT’s latest annual market study included a demand for the cost of selling property to come down.  I am all for that. But the OFT chooses the easy target and blames the cripplingly high cost of property transactions on estate agents commission.

Now, I am not going to say that estate agents have a moral right to a fat commission.  Far from it – commission rates are set by competition in a free market.  Furthermore, commission rates in the UK are generally extremely low – on the Continent, fees of six to ten per cent are commonplace.

Estate agents are notorious for going over the top in describing the houses they sell, though strangely the owners of the houses in question never tell us to tone our prose down.

But a house we have just been instructed to sell deserves all the superlatives I can throw into the brochure. It is truly fabulous and I would just love to live in it myself.

The house is in one of the prettiest locations on the planet--St Katharine's Precinct on the western side of Regent's Park. It is a little enclave of houses built round the Danish Church. It was designed in 1826 to look a bit like the quad of an Oxbridge college. Even the church looks like a miniature King’s College chapel.

Well, the stamp duty holiday has ended and the world is still turning. In central London, of course, very few properties come into the lower stamp duty brackets so for us it was more of a long weekend than a proper holiday.

The Council of Mortgage Lenders reported that the amount lent on property nationally in December jumped by 14 per cent, which may reflect buyers attempting to push through their purchased before stamp duty went back up again. CML economist Paul Samter is quoted as saying that the January figures may well be boosted by buyers who failed to make the deadline but were too deep into the transaction to pull out.

Be that as it may, lending is still in the doldrums – the December figure of £13.7 billion is the lowest for that month since 2001, so we are a long way from a full recovery. Many analysts expect the national market to drop off in the spring as the market gets over the stamp duty holiday blues and recover somewhat later in the year.