"Property's not fish, it won't go off.” With these words one owner declined to sell his home in the current nerve-testing market - where buyers stalk the streets of London and the more prosperous towns within an easy-ish commute of the capital in search of big money-off opportunities.

But, for some would-be sellers, the feeling that “I want to get on with my life” is providing an equally compelling reason to go for it. Lee Watts, managing director of Kinleigh Folkard & Hayward, the estate agents, says that he is seeing an increasing number of new properties coming to the market, “rather than old stock swapping agents as we saw in the second half of 2008”.

Whether this move is rewarded depends on whether potential buyers consider the price realistic. Lindsay Cuthill, of Savills, cites the example of a two-bedroom terraced house in Putney, southwest London, put up for sale at the end of last week for £425,000. This valuation was evidently well-pitched as there were 50 inquiries, seven bids, some of them cash offers and a sale has already been agreed at something “in excess of the asking price”. Some of this demand arises from the shortage of stock in this part of the capital.

Mr Cuthill says: “People come to me saying that they want a place for £500,000 and I haven't anything to show them.”

Estate agents know better than to see this sudden burst of bargain-hunting as a new dawn. For it is a game open only to people with plenty of spare cash or those owner-occupiers of long standing who still have a stash of equity in their existing homes and who sense a chance at last to move to something grander. First-time buyers are still in the dark as to when and how they will be able to take part.