Mortgage approvals reach nine month high in October The RICS survey also showed new buyer enquiries and agreed sales both rising at their fastest rate in October since December 2009. There was also a pick-up in new properties coming on to the market. However, the BBA said these signs of a pick-up in housing market activity need to be treated with considerable caution as there have been previous false dawns recently, and housing market activity remains low compared to long-term norms. It said the recent signs of modestly improving housing market activity and the likely increasing beneficial impact of the Funding for Lending Scheme are leading us to believe that house prices are now likely to be fundamentally stable over the coming months, rather than drift down gradually. However, it still suspects that any significant, sustainable turnaround in house prices is still some way off. Dan McLeod, director of estate agents Atkinson McLeod, said: "The property market as a whole remains a shadow of its former self. The mortgage market is black and white. There are the people with big deposits who can get fantastically competitive loans and transact quickly, and there are the people with small deposits who face a Herculean struggle to complete a purchase. Until people with smaller deposits can purchase with more certainty, the property market will remain on a hiding to nothing. We'll see sporadic upticks in activity, as we're seeing now, but the market will never rebound in earnest. Anyone who looks at this data as the beginning of a recovery in the property market is kidding themselves. If you're trying to buy a property with anything less than a 15% deposit, it's touch and go from day one. 10% deposit or less and the odds are immediately stacked against you. One positive development is that prospective buyers now know that there's no point viewing properties they can't really afford. There is a new realism within property.