AS anyone trying to take that first vital step on the Jersey housing ladder knows only too well, we are now in the era of the half-million-pound three-bedroom house.

Indeed, even a one-bedroom flat, the most basic of starter homes, will now set the buyer back a quarter of a million.

These are staggering sums when seen against the background of the housing markets in most parts of Britain and throughout most of Europe, but they reflect a basic, if inconvenient and cruel, fact of Island economic life – scarcity of supply equals high prices.

Meanwhile, the percentage increase in housing costs over the past 12 months drives home the message that the market has been running out of control.

The year-on-year rise of 24 per cent, which far outstripped the increase in the cost of living over the same period and, crucially, the rise in rates of pay, is simultaneously the stuff of dreams and of nightmares. Home-owners bask in the comfortable delusion of growing richer by the minute, while young couples are all too well aware that they are aiming at a target that is accelerating away from them.

Those eager to see the best in the present situation will take comfort from the fact that most Islanders are unaffected by the housing slump in the UK and that the prospect of negative equity here is, at present, remote in the extreme.

In spite of this, it does not require tremendous economic knowledge to understand that our present house price boom cannot be sustained at recent rates. It is, therefore, just as well that the latest statistics, published today, show that the market is stabilising, prices across the board having risen by only one per cent since the end of the first quarter of this year.

This, however, may not be indicative of changing conditions inside the Island, where demand and supply have remained severely out of equilibrium. In all probability, it means that the worldwide credit crunch, which has made loans of all sorts difficult to obtain, is limiting the availability of mortgages – except on terms involving large deposits which, once again, thwart the ambitions of far too many people who, in respect of home ownership, are Jersey’s have-nots.