Though the storm clouds appear to be gathering, it may be just the time to take advantage and sell.

Firstly, you may be wanting to leave the City for a place in the country

In this scenario, you have a family home, which you have owned for five years, or more.

You have built-up equity in your property, and family houses can sell extremely well.

As property prices in London are still at a high,they could have a comparative advantage to those in the area you would like to move to in the country.

Look at this carefully, though. As reported last month in the Sunday Times, the current supply of the best-priced country properties is dwindling. Best not to waste too much time chasing possible shadows, or the over priced properties.

Secondly, you may be looking to trade to trade-up

You want to an extra bedroom, perhaps moving-up from a two-bedroom maisonette flat to a three-bedroom semi-detached, or terraced house. Again, success is about benefiting from the comparative price reduction in properties. How this goes is, take your property at, say, £300,000 on the market and its price goes down 10%, you can expect £30,000 less, if you sell it. Now, you have your eye on a property priced at £450,000, there is a chance that you can negotiate a similar 10% reduction in price to that suffered by your property. If successful, you stand to gain £45,000. So the argument goes, suffer a temporary shortfall on your sale to win a greater offset on the new property.

Thirdly, you are an elderly couple and wish to trade-down

Here, you are seeing equity in your property dwindling, or likely to dwindle. You may wish to be patient and wait for prices to start going up again. Alternatively, this may just be the time to downsize, releasing capital for your use now. Your financial priorities may lie with helping your children realize a dream of owning their own property. Or ,you may simply want to have some more of the things you had promised yourselves, more holidays, or that caravan in your favourite part of the world.

Finally, do your research, plan carefully, it can make a difference to you in these seemingly gloomy times.