The bubble is NOT going to burst. At least, that's what Swindon's property gurus are saying, following the Evening Advertiser's recent story on falling house prices. Indeed, most of the town's estate agents say that prices are merely levelling off after a period of unprecedented price hikes. Jeremy Smith reports

David Ingram, director of Goodman Ingram which has three offices in Old Town, Swindon, Wootton Bassett and Cricklade:

The likelihood is that the rate of increase is ultimately going to slow.

I'd agree that the market has cooled, marginally, but we are still consistently, week in, week out, selling properties.

It is probably true to say that agents, in a rising market, value for the future. And by that I mean if somebody had looked at a property in November, and valued it in a rising market, and if they had sold a similar property for say £140,000, the chances are they'd have been looking at saying, let's go for £145,000 or maybe even higher than that.

Now hindsight is a wonderful thing, and as always happens with the property market, once you start to look back, it can become apparent that, in this instance, the rate of increase was not still climbing.

So then you have a situation where properties have come down in price, but part of the reason for that is that they were valued on the basis that the market was still rising, and of course in hindsight it wasn't.

World events are inevitably going to create certain anxieties but we're not looking at a bubble bursting. In fact, it's a fairly balanced market, with neither the buyer nor seller as king.

In short, if you bring a property to the market at a relatively realistic figure, there are buyers out there willing to pay it.