With the madness of yesterday's booming Nationwide index - a house price bubble during a slump and a lending famine - still echoing in our ears, the Times this morning declares off-plan purchasing back.

The enthusiasm for off plan can be seen all over the country, and at all prices. Almost a third of the 27 new homes on the gated Princess Square development in Esher, Surrey (princesssquare.com) — priced from £1 million to nearly £3 million — have been sold. The development went on sale in August last year and will be finished by the end of the year.

And, of course, there are plenty of other examples cited in the piece. Remarkable courage, in the Rat and Mouse's view, especially as a second economic contagion, starting in the Eurozone, looks likely. Perhaps the hope is that all those wealthy Europeans, desperate to get their money into something more stable, will join the Greeks and start ploughing it into UK property... where there's little room and tough planning regulations.

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