A property crash in the UK housing market is starting to look more and more likely. Just today the Royal Institution of Charted Surveyors announced that house prices in September fell at their fastest rate in two years.

There's also no shortage of headlines in the media at the moment. Although they seem to love creating attention-grabbing doom-mongering stories, there is always some substance to these stories.

Here's just a few headlines I've come across recently:

- Surveyors see more house price falls in UK
- One in four young households priced out of property ownership in UK
- Professional view: "The whole property market is overvalued"
- Housing market to cool rapidly into 2008

Plus of course there's all the TV news headlines continually discussing the US sub-prime crisis, the plight of Northern Rock, first-time buyers being priced out of the market, and so on.

The more that a property slump is discussed in the media, the more likely it is to happen because it will eventually become a self-fulfilling prophecy as potential buyers and sellers react to this news.

My own opinion is that we will see property prices come down in the next few years as they have simply overstretched themselves. We have had a long and sustained property boom so a pullback is inevitable. Property is too unaffordable at the moment and prices have grown far faster than earnings have, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if we have a few years of stagnation and slightly lower prices.

I don't think we'll get a full blown crash though as interest rates are predicted to fall slightly in the next few years and they're still relatively low in historical terms.