“Despite July’s stronger result, house prices have lost a bit of steam in recent months.”

The uncertain direction of the property market is matched by a wider lack of clarity over the Bank’s next moves. Most analysts expect it to signal, in its Inflation Report next week, that one more interest rate rise is on the cards. Whether policy will have to tighten any more largely depends on how big a delayed reaction is in store from the greatly increased cost of people’s mortgages.

Roger Bootle, economic adviser to Deloitte, said that the five interest rate rises over the past year appeared to have had little impact. He said that the recent floods threatened to increase food prices, which, with the Homeowners were given a welcome respite yesterday when the Bank of England kept interest rates on hold amid conflicting signals about the direction of the economy and after days of turmoil in financial markets.

Analysts said, however, that despite the decision of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) to maintain the Bank Rate at 5.75 per cent, the chances remained high that rates would climb to 6 per cent in the autumn.

There was evidence yesterday from Halifax that the Bank’s five rate rises have not yet done enough to cool a booming economy. The nation’s biggest mortgage lender reported the strongest house price inflation in more than two years, up by 0.7 per cent last month compared with a 0.4 per cent rise in June. That took the annual rate to 11.2 per cent from 10.6 per cent the previous month.

However, the figures clashed with reports from Nationwide and other surveys of a much sharper slowdown. Halifax said that, despite the strong headline figures, the underlying trend appeared to be slowing. The three-month pace of growth, which the MPC now appears to track more closely than the one-month figures, showed prices rising by 1.2 per cent, the weakest such figure since last August.

Kelvin Davidson, property economist at Capital Economics, said: surge in oil prices, would make it harder for inflation to return to its 2 per cent target, meaning that interest rates above 6 per cent were still a possibility.

However, Gavin Redknap, of Standard Chartered Bank, said: “With growing evidence of weakness in housing among other things, further tightening past 6 per cent looks increasingly unnecessary. Inflation should continue to trend lower in the UK over the foreseeable future.”

Doves on the MPC have expressed concern that borrowers who locked into a two-year, fixed-rate mortgage in 2005 will face a very sharp increase in their borrowing costs when they come to refinance their loans in the coming months. A report from CACI, a marketing information company, finds today that the 287,000 households who will have to remortgage between now and the end of the year are facing increases in their mortgage interest payments of up to 33 per cent.

Fixed-rate mortgages reached their lowest point in December 2005, the report says, when average mortgage rates fell to 4.7 per cent and deals were available that were as low as 4.4 per cent.

The report suggests that richer parts of the country could be hit more severely. Areas such as Kingston upon Thames and Twickenham, southwest London, and Guildford, Surrey, have a very high proportion of people on fixed-rate mortgages who have borrowed more than 85 per cent of their property’s value.