The press love a good headline!

It's no wonder that prospective house buyers are getting the jitters. You only have to turn on the TV or open the newspaper to be confronted with headlines saying the property market is in free-fall.

Apparently no-one has any confidence in current property values being sustained let alone increasing for the foreseeable future. It seems all the news is bad news where property and mortgages are concerned.

There is a case however for ignoring the blanket headlines and start to look more closely at what is really happening to property prices in your local area. A different picture might begin to emerge.

Is the glass half empty or half full?

Many of the negative headlines quote opinions and forecasts from pundits such as estate agents, surveyors and lenders. For example, latest Nationwide figures claimed that house prices fell this month by 2.5% and are down £8,000 compared with this time last year.

Sounds alarming, but not too devastating if at the same time last year prices had previously risen by 12% or something in excess of £20,000 in monetary terms. If you're not moving, it makes no difference.

If you're selling, you won't make as much as you would have if you'd sold a year ago, but you're probably not actually losing money except on paper. If you're buying, you can get a cheaper deal now than you could before.

Furthermore, the pundits tend to generalise picking up purely on headline statistics. But arguably a more reliable source of information is Land Registry which records precisely the price at which individual properties changes hands.

According to Land Registry, property prices fell by just 0.2% during April, taking the average house price to £183,626. Land Registry says that the annual rate of house price inflation also slipped from 3.6% to 2.6%. Think about this - it means that the rate property prices are increasing slowed a little. It doesn't mean property values went down.

To put this in perspective, take Worthing (which is where Independent Mortgage Network is based) as an example. According to Land Registry, the average selling price during the first quarter of 2008 was £217,674, representing a 6.9% rise in prices year on year.

Neighboring town Horsham did even better, with the average price increasing by a whacking 8.8% in the very three months at the beginning of this year when the media was pronouncing doom and gloom for the property market!

So, in West Sussex at least, the message for would-be house buyers is to buy now as property prices are going up. If you are delaying a move or a first time purchase because you are expecting prices to fall, you may have a long wait.

A good mortgage broker can help

In case you think getting a mortgage is a problem, bear in mind that the Building Societies Association this month reports a 3.3% fall in gross lending, dropping from £3.7bn in April 2007 to £3.6bn in 2008.

This is hardly devastating news and not much of a dent in mortgage volumes over the last year, so not a reason to put off your purchase or move - you just need to know where to look and a good mortgage broker might be just what you need.