The truth of the matter is, there never is a right time.

Since the beginning of the year, there has been rife speculation about what the UK Property Market is going to do. The press has reported some large commercial and residential deals which has created a generally positive opinion, but as ever this is mixed in with a constant flow of both +ive and -ive chit chat and noise.

Due to the fragility of our economy and our apparent emergence from "recession", for some reason the property pundets are out in force using their crystal balls for all manner of star gazing. There is a constant stream of preditions from Tom, Dick, Harry and Sally about which locations are most likely to rise in value, to fall in value, what is the effect of the election, how will house prices react to the end of the recession, comments on the latest mortgage figures, nationwide figures, halifax figures, landregistry figures, Hometrack figures, unemployment figures and interest rates.

But the sorry fact about all of this is that apart from being an interesting destraction, and waste of paper, in my opinion it is all totaly irrelevant. To put it bluntly all of this data is too old or not specific enough to give either the writer or the reader a good enough picture from which to form a prediction or opinion.

For a start there is a generall problem for all the national data, and that is that we have an international city which creates an anomily in the figures. London sales have in this past recession been shown to buck the trend of the national result, for example Winkworth estate agents recently commented that they felt, that at the tale end of last year, prices rose by up to 20%. Now, working in the market I think I can agree with that, however it does not mean that prices in Nottingham have risen in the same manner in fact it could be quite the opposite.

In addition, the land registry sold prices for example, only show data for sales that took place upto 6 months prior, as many sales don't get registerd for months, not to mention the large number of sales especialy in London where prices are not registerd and are bought through off shore companies etc. Also consider this, a price is set often months before the actual sale takes place, but the actual sales process delays these figures showing in any results.

But besides all the inadequacies of the data, the problem is this very basic. Basing your personal property decisions on a reporters analysis of out of date national data is a pretty dreadful idea!

Take for example one of todays headlines "House prices could rise by 10% a year, Nationwide says" Now lets just examine this statement, according to the report this 10% rise is on the back of the latest data from the Nationwide who are telling us that house prices rose by 1.2% in January thus extrapilating this on for the year they come up with a 10% rise (ok this is very basic but you get the idea). Anyway as a result of this report some people will now decide to wait out this rise to capitalise on this predicted increase, and similarly some people will decide that what goes up must come down so, like they always have, will wait for the crash before they decide to buy.

As any sane individual can see, this is not condusive to a happy market, or for that matter a happy life. Imagine putting your life on hold whilst you wait for the perfect time to sell or the perfect time to buy... just wake up, it does not exsist... IT DOES NOT EXSIST

This constant star gazing also applies to those who should know better. Only today, a well educated and bright young agent told me about his own property market woes. He had sold around Christmas 2008 when he felt the market was only heading in one direction, and has since rented for the last year. Sitting out of the market, he and his mrs wait to find the right property. Even by his own admission he realises that in that time his ideal property has moved from being easily affordable to affordable to not affordable.

His justification for this, like many, is that we have not dealt with the mountain of debt and that there is a black cloud on the horrizon etc etc... Well that may be, but by the time this black cloud arrives and casts its 15% drop in price shaddow over the market, the prices will have risen by another 10% and the end result will still be an overall increase.

I hope by now you can see my rather verbose point. When buying or selling you should do so not with an eye on the market but with an eye on your future. Buy for the long term, by which I mean 5-7-10 years or more. This should mean that you can happily sit in your property and hopefuly wait out any adverse fluctuations in the market. But remember if you sell and buy at the same time the values remains the same in comparison to the rest of the market place, so your possition remains the same.

If you alow your property decisions to be influenced by people, the majority of wholm don't work in the market, who are comenting on out of date data, then really it's the tail wagging the dog and nothing more.

So you see there really is no right time to buy or for that matter sell, just get on and make the decision and buy as well as you can when you decide you need to.