So the Bank of England is watching the housing market closely, with Governor Mark Carney warning at the weekend that the biggest risk to financial stability and the long term economic recovery is an overheating property market.
There were lots of headlines about the huge financial risks, but the most interesting comment for me was the fact that Carney pointed to the root of the problem - not enough homes are being built. As he said, the fundamental problem is a shortage of home and the Bank of England has no solution for that.
"There are not sufficient houses built in the UK. To go back to Canada, there are half as many people in Canada as in the UK, twice as many houses are built every year in Canada as in the UK and we can't influence that."
Official government figures show the country began work on 133,650 new home in the 12 months to March this year, a rise of 31% on the year before.
Carney said he was watching the housing market closely, and would tell the chancellor George Osborne if he believed changes needed to be made and this could mean limiting certain types of mortgages or limiting the hugely popular Help to Buy schemes.
The most recent figures show that average asking prices are nearly 9% higher than a year ago, rising to a new record of £272,003 in May, the highest annual increase since October 2007. Prices in London rose more than 16% over the same period.
London and parts of the south east have been mentioned as experience a property bubble but it must be remembered that for a bubble to burst you need a sustained drop in demand, yet estate agents in the capital report a consistently high level of would be buyers and they are not all from abroad.
So while you might describe London's annual jump of over 16% as being as a result of a very frothy market, it is underpinned by long term demand and a genuine shortage of housing supply.
And other parts of the country, most notably the northern regions are still below their previous peaks, and while all four southern regions are at all time highs, the average annual rise outside London remains below 5%.
Also, the Home Builders Federation has pointed out that the current acute shortage of housing has developed over decades and is going to take time to address. After years of the lowest rate on record, house building is now increasing very rapidly.
The government's Help to Buy equity loan scheme has been credited with giving a boost to house building and allowed the industry to plan ahead so to tamper with that could end up reducing the number of buyers available and that indeed could create a bubble.
Ray Clancy
Editor Property Wire
