London Calling:The Jeremiahs in England are predicting that 2007 will be the year of its property crash - or at least its 'market correction'. They could - eventually - be right, says Angela Pertusini

As any estate agent will tell you, 2006 was a fantastic year for property prices and, so it follows that any economics forecaster will tell you that 2007 will be the year of the crash.

Certainly the first two months of the year have shown very little sign of impending doom ­ unless, of course, you're in the unfortunate position of trying to buy somewhere - with newspapers gleefully reporting the lowest number of houses for sale for almost quarter of a century, leading to frantic bidding wars and general gazumping lunacy.

But this, as the forecasting Jeremiahs point out, is yet another sign of unsustainability which, coupled with last month's government figures that put the average UK house price at more than £200,000 (€293,791) and almost £300,000 (€440,703) for us poor Londoners, three interest rate hikes in five months and the soaring number of personal bankruptcies, mean an imminent "market correction".

Of course they may be right although, one suspects, there is a certain kudos to be had from predicting the British equivalent of an economic tsunami. If the possibility is posited often enough, someone will - one day - get it right.

Nevertheless, in the far more sober world of commercial property, there are similar warnings of a slowdown whichever perspective you happen to take.

... Hatches are being battened down in the City because of the recent sales of the Swiss Re Building ("the Gherkin") for £620 million (€910m) and the crafty sale and leaseback of the HSBC Canary Wharf offices - both companies are felt to have cashed in at the top of the market.

Meanwhile, further west, the iconic art deco Shell-Mex building on the Strand has had a second sale fall-through within four months as its buyers, rumoured to be members of the Dubai royal family, believed it to be overpriced.

Of course it could be that the Shell-Mex Building's buyers simply wanted to keep their funds liquid for the purchase of one of the four One Hyde Park penthouses, designed by Richard Rogers, as yet unbuilt and, according to reports, available for the breathtaking amount of £84 million (€123m) each .

Quite where developers Candy & Candy pulled this figure from is anyone's guess - they refuse to confirm the price but have let it be known there is no shortage of buyers - although one estate agent rather heroically went on record to say that he thought it was more likely to be £77 million (€113m), as if that made it any more realistic.

The one thing that everyone is agreed upon is that they will encompass a never-before-encountered lavishness of finish and facilities.

But quite what this amounts to is hazy: there is talk of room service from an adjoining hotel, bullet-proof windows, panic rooms and spas but nothing that really sets the imagination alight.

As someone who gets her benchmark of luxury from Bond villains, I want to hear about torpedo hatches, rocket landing pads or, at the very least, the gratuitous use of endangered animals' pelts in the soft furnishings.

Whoever buys one of these penthouses will have to make sure that it is not kept empty for too long as the first Empty Homes Management Order (EHMO) was issued last month. Devised to get empty homes back in use, it gives a local authority the right to take over a long-standing empty property, carry out any necessary renovations and then rent it out - at a non-market rate - for up to seven years.

The legislation was driven through by deputy PM, John Prescott, and was like much of the policies that originate from his office, initially scoffed at and then promptly forgotten.

The fact that it has passed through parliament and is now being used has come as a bit of shock.

The house at the centre of this scary new law is an innocuous 1980s terrace in Oxfordshire (Oxfordshire may be a testbed for batty government policy - it was the same county that first jailed a mother for allowing her daughter to persistently truant). The owner has been given a year to find his own tenants - although after 12 years of keeping the house empty, you have to wonder if he's that bothered - or the council will find them for him.

The chief of the Empty Homes Agency said, somewhat ominously, that he knew of "other cases in the pipeline".

Curiously, local authorities, notorious for their boarded up council flats and houses, are exempt from the policy.