By Tony Booth

In a bid to claw back some of its lost business, a well known but desperate developer has recently announced an extraordinary deal ... if you buy one of their properties, they will protect it against falling prices over the next three years and give you back up to 15 per cent if its value nosedives.

I decided this 'incentive' was one of the few that might be worth exploring a little deeper, just to see whether it was all a little too good to be true ... or a genuine confidence builder.

The construction industry in the UK is slowly grinding to a halt. Projects that developers had started or were about to start just as the housing crisis began had to be completed because funding, land purchases and manpower had already been committed.

Abandoning them would have involved massive losses - but completing them has also caused financial difficulties, because there are not nearly enough buyers actively investing. This situation has left a glut of new-build homes on builders' books, with some recently completed estates standing virtually derelict.