THE fact Rumford Investments has finally managed to sell all of the apartments at its Unity development is no mean feat.

The general housing market has been in the doldrums for 18 months now, and the city centre flat market for much longer. Plenty of developers are finding it slow going disposing of all the units they have constructed.

Unity’s ray of sunshine comes on the day the Department of Communities and Local Government revealed the findings of its own survey which show that house prices stabilised in the month of January, albeit 11% beneath the previous year.

However, I wouldn’t read too much into that one piece of data. The housing market will remain weak for many months to come. The fact Unity has sold out is a consequence of a long, hard slog, not renewed confidence among home buyers.

When the market does pick up in terms of transactions, prices will stay weak. That’s because the funds available to bid prices up won’t be anything like as plentiful as they once were. The Chinese will not be investing trillions of dollars in mortgage-backed assets for decades to come.

Furthermore, the Government has changed its mind about planning guidelines that have for a decade restricted the number of new homes that can be built. That relaxation should mean an increase in the supply of homes in the future, which helps keep prices down.

What the market really needs now is stability. If yesterday’s government figures are a sign of what is to come in the next few months, maybe that stability has arrived. If so, we can all get back to making the plans for the ordinary things of life, such as getting married, having kids, retiring, etc.

Yet, there is a little bit of me that recalls how the housing market slumped in the early 1990s. That crash should have demonstrated once and for all the economic and social unsustainability of high house prices. But, by the mid-1990s, prices were rising sharply again. So it remains open to doubt, then, whether we have learned the lessons this time around.

The only people able to regulate the market and ensure lessons are put into practice are governments and their agencies.