The housing market is heating up with new estate agent figures showing an increasing number of properties being put up for sale and more homes changing hands.

As more For Sale signs go up, however, the number of properties available to rent is falling, which is likely to push rents higher.

A third of chartered surveyors expect rents to rise over the next three months, according to the latest Lettings Survey from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).

Rents across the UK have been falling for many months now. In fact, statistics show that rents have been on a downward trend since Autumn 2008.

However, the supply of new properties coming on to the rental market has fallen for the second consecutive quarter, meaning that demand for rental properties is now outstripping supply.

More than a fifth of the chartered surveyors who responded to the survey saw a fall in the number of instructions coming from new landlords between November 2009 and January 2010.

One of the main reasons for this is that so-called accidental landlords, who had to rent out properties, rather than sell them due to the weakness of the housing market over the past couple of years, are now attempting to take advantage of the current upturn to sell their houses and flats on.

First-time buyers deserted the housing market in droves in January after the stamp duty holiday came to an end.

The housing market almost ground a halt at the start of the year when the number of mortgages approved for house purchases nearly halved, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders. The biggest drop was in first-time buyers - down 54% on December at 11,300.

The number of first-time buyers had hit a two-year high in December, suggesting many rushed to complete before the beginning of January when stamp duty was reintroduced on properties costing between £125,000 and £175,000.

The financial regulator recently 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.