According to John Elliott, managing director of Millwood Designer Homes, negative housing reports are doing more harm than good and, if recent sales are anything to go by, are wide of the mark.

Capital Economics, the research consultancy, is just one of the companies that has continued to produce downbeat reports on the state of the housing market, predicting a new, weaker trend, with price falls likely to continue this year and next.

Chief property economist for the company, Ed Stansfield, has also been reported as saying that not only is the market still significantly overvalued on most measures but also the lack of mortgage credit and the weak economic outlook also point to prices falling through the rest of this year and 2011.

The Sunday Times recently ran an interesting article that looked at how accurate the forecasts from a number of well-known economists had been over the last couple of years.

It reported that most forecasters' predictions for bank rate have been too high in the past. A year ago, the National Institute of Economic & Social Research (Niesr) forecast the bank rate would be at 1.75 per cent at the end of this year. With the rate still at 0.5 per cent, it is pretty wide of the mark and so have had to correct their prediction. Simon Kirby of Niesr now thinks that interest rates will be just 0.75 per cent by the end of 2011. But this correction comes just a little too late and I believe that the over-inflated predictions from a number of forecasters have had a damaging effect on the state of our recovery.

Capital Economics was one of the very few forecasters to have called interest rates correctly a year ago. However, it has not been so accurate when it comes to house prices. According to The Times, Capital Economic's Roger Bootle predicted that house prices would peak in 2003 before falling 20 per cent by mid-2005.

This was proved wrong when prices continued to rise throughout the period, yet Capital Economics still remained sceptical, calling a five per cent drop in prices in 2006. This never happened.

In 2008 it said prices would fall by 35 per cent between 2008 and 2010 but by December 2009 prices had almost recovered to 2007 levels, so Capital Economics could not have been more wrong!

Despite all this, at Millwood we continue to enjoy strong property sales at our developments. In the last month, four more properties have been reserved, with two of our developments selling out.

Quality properties in prime locations are still selling well and the recent activity we have witnessed is testament to the fact that the picture is not all doom and gloom.

Will this silence the critics? Probably not, but the continual negativity from some may have a detrimental effect on the gradual recovery we have all been so relieved to see.