It was only last spring we were being told house prices were down 18 per cent on the year: now the rate of inflation is about to become plus 10 per cent. A hidden housing boom is underway.

All right, the increase in property prices does not yet undo the previous collapse, but it seems to confirm that the market is no longer falling and many should welcome a swift bounce back rather than a slow crawl to recovery. Much consumer confidence is based on house values: they encouraged people to borrow their way through the boom and they were a first sign of gloom, going into recession a year before the rest of the economy followed.

Even paper gains and losses affect consumer sentiment, providing a feelgood factor on the way up as gearing increases owners’ wealth disproportionately or the leverage eroding their equity with an even worse ferocity on the way down. And for some people the revival in the property market is tangible because negative equity is no longer a risk. It helps explain why mortgage lenders’ predictions of repossessions have been slashed from 75,000 to 48,000 this year.

Statistics from the Halifax still show house prices falling over the past 12 months but there are two flaws in the figures. First, the lenders’ annual rate is not calculated by comparing December this year with December last year but by comparing the average of the latest three months with the same quarter a year ago. The justification is to remove blips from the stats, but while it makes little difference when markets are going in the same direction now as a year ago, it produces severe distortion when markets turn.

(For the mathematically inclined, think of a series of numbers rising from 99, to 100 and 101 over January to March last year but falling from 103 to 102 and 101 in the same months this year. As both March figures are 101 there is zero annual change, but the three-month average formula compares 102 now with 100 a year ago and claims a 2 per cent rise even though the market is falling.)

Nationwide calculates a straight month-on-month comparison and starting showing a small positive annual change in October 2009. But even its statistics contain a distortion. From February to September Nationwide’s monthly figures were rising but its annual rate remained negative. That’s because the falls at the start of the year outweighed the later rises.

But those later rises, according to Nationwide’s own figures, show prices rising by more than 10 per cent between February and November 2009. If 10 per cent in eight months is not a boom, what is? And once the secret is out and generally known it may provide the feelgood factor and confidence that allows consumer to spend, people to move home, employers to keep jobs open, lenders to delay repossessions and perhaps even encourage governments to be less austere.

The housing boom may not last, but it is there and – despite the excesses this market can deliver – it is a good thing.

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