The gravy train has well and truly smashed in to the buffers in the credit crunch.

The downturn in property prices was the signal the market needed to derail all the hangers-on like property gurus, gifted deposit gangsters and seminar snakeskin oil salesmen.

I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the freeloaders closing up shop quicker than a Japanese bullet train travelling at full speed.

It’s true the property market was a crash waiting to happen. But the real problem is not the investors who are feeling the squeeze but the industry that built up to leech off their success.

What’s wrong with growing rich sensible investment decisions that are profitable and tax effective?

Surely the shady sharks circling the property sector preying on the less experienced investors realised that one day they would switch from the hunter to the prey.

If these guys had so many property secrets to reveal for their ridiculously bloated fees, why didn’t they see this crash coming and why are so many of these gurus now facing ruin. I

t just goes to show that these people had no knowledge to share and were living off the crumbs from decent investors’ tables.

The old adage goes that if something looks too good to be true, it usually is. These guys weren’t making money from property, they were in a fee frenzy sucking cash from the wallets of the unwary who didn’t understand the money they were paying over for ‘insider info’ was equivalent in many cases to the deposit on a decent investment property.

Property people who have made sensible decisions will ride out the crisis, and be better off for the experience - as for the rest, good riddance to bad rubbish.

No good reason for motivation

On the subject of motivated sellers, there seems something inherently wrong with the trend of sell-and-rent-back.

The strategy is for a property investor to buy a property at way below market value and then rent it back to the former owner who pays no rent in return for a guarantee that they can carry on living there as long as they wish.

I seem to remember several building societies getting taken to task for similar schemes in the past - then they were called reversionary mortgages.

The problem then was the huge profits they were making at the expense of their customers.

A quick Google shows there are dozens of property investment firms out there looking for sale-and-rent-back deals. I just can’t see why any homeowner would want to give up their most valuable personal asset for a fraction of its price and the practise just seems unwholesome and subject of regulation to protect the innocent.