Yesterday the financial regulator came out with a shocking claim. Lord Adair Turner warned that if we had shock rises in interest rates, more rises in unemployment, or falls in property prices, millions of people could lose their home.

He said young families and young professionals were most at risk.

And the scary thing? All three of those things are entirely possible.

So what can we do about it?

New figures have revealed that if you ever want to be able to afford to buy your own home, you can ditch any plans to have kids, at least if you live in London. Apparently in the capital nine in ten families with children cannot afford their own home in their 40s.

If you decide against breeding then you have a better chance, because almost a third of couples without kids can afford a house of their own (at least they could in 2008 when the figures were last available).

So just how bad have things become, and what can we do about it?

The housing market has always been a confusing place to look for certainty and absolutes, because your home is worth what someone else is prepared to pay for it - no more, no less.

Working out what someone will pay for your house is a fairly dark art, but there is one major influence, the balance between supply and demand, and figures out today reveal that this has turned.

So what does it mean, and what next for house prices?

You can sell your home for as little as £999 on a new property website run by estate agency group Spicerhaart in association with supermarket giant Tesco.

This means you can save thousands of pounds in estate agency fees. The move comes after an Office of Fair Trading ruling that estate agency rules should be relaxed to allow more online competition. Google is rumoured to be eyeing up the market as well.

The iSold.com site describes itself as a halfway house between an online service and a traditional estate agent.

More mortgage deals have become available over the past month, in particular higher loan-to-value mortgages, as lenders grow more confident about lending money again. Several have also cut their mortgage rates by between 0.1% and 0.5% in recent weeks.

At the beginning of March there were 1,798 mortgage deals on the market that required deposits of between 0% and 40%, according to Moneyfacts. The number was up 6% from a month ago, and 68% higher than a year ago.

There are still very few mortgages available with just 0% or 5% deposits, but there are now 489 deals that ask for 10% or 15% down payments compared to just 258 a year ago - making things easier for first-time buyers.

New figures reveal the scary ups and downs of the property market last year, holding a cautionary tale for buyers and sellers.

The statistics, from property website Zoopla.co.uk, show that last year saw incredible ups and downs.

The first half of the year was downright terrible. The number of properties sold was down by over a third from a year earlier, and average prices fell 2.2% (from £205,607 to £201,067).

In the second half of the year, it was all change, as the number of properties sold was a third higher than the same time the year before, and prices soared 4.7% to reach an average value of £210,661 by the year end.

So what does this tell us? Apart from the fact that selling last June was a disaster.

Yes, it's another day, and another new direction for house prices. This time they are showing all sorts of healthy signs.

So why the change in sentiment?

This report managed to buck the trend for reporting price falls, by measuring something completely different. It looked at the gap between the price of properties sold at auction and the price of those sold more conventionally.

This gap is narrowing, which has traditionally been good news, but what does it really mean?

My parents have been planning to move for a while now, but with the economic climate as it is at the moment, they've given up all hope of selling up for a while yet. Instead my father (who is, by his own admission, a DIY King) has decided to gradually spruce up their house so that when the time is right to sell, he will have added some value to it.

As well as that, there's nothing better than some redecoration to make you fall in love with your home all over again. I have my suspicions that once he's finished, they're not going to want to move!

So if you're putting off selling, why not add a bit of colour to your home without having to shell out a fortune? You can have some and make your house worth a bit more.

Estate agents are a funny bunch. They knowingly and willingly picked a profession that is widely reviled, and yet when they read something less than positive about themselves they respond in fury about the decent hard-working estate agents overlooked by nasty voracious journalists.

I can't complain. I knowingly and willingly went into a profession widely loathed by the rest of the population too.

However, at the risk of irritating the agents again, I might venture that not every agent is necessarily working in the best interests of their client, and indeed there are a bunch of cowboys out there to rip you off.

So, in the spirit of not tarring all agents with the same brush, I offer you a guide to how to tell the gems from the cowboys.

How brave are you feeling? If you're feeling shockproof, then you may be thinking about getting back into the property game. With the recession all but over (possible double-dips looking pretty unlikely), buyers are stalking the estate agents' windows like the days of old.

Many investors came a cropper a couple of years back when they piled into anything made of bricks, not caring where it was. Avoid making the same mistake with this guide to the British property hotspots of tomorrow, and look out soon for our guide to the hotspots in the overseas market.