The properties that make Britain great are to be found all over the UK. Cue wisteria choked-cottages, sharp-shouldered rectories, ship-size Georgian mansions and teetering townhouses, all designed grandly and all probably once featured in Country Life magazine.

These architectural clichés are hard coded into our national psyche and by comparison Americans are mostly bereft of anything old, Australians have to do with identical modern neighbours and the French hate their drafty old chateaux and prefer new build bungalows.

But is that true – what homes do we British really have the property hots for? After trawling through the million or so properties listed on our site for sale and rent and looking at search patterns among our two and a half million users, all can be revealed.

A majority of us, our research shows, seek a detached property with a large garden in the heart of walking country and overlooking beautiful countryside. As Kirstie and Phil would say, such a tick list is not easy to fill.

Properties like the one pictured below are not even one to the dozen. So it’s no surprise that they are hugely in demand and are twice the national average house price (or £523,866 to be exact).

Britain's most desired home? This 18th/19th century stone farmhouse outside Avonbridge in Falkirk has outstanding views over the local countryside and comes with part ownership of a local nature reserve.

But the main truth our research has revealed is just how much we are nation of urban and suburban dwellers which pines for the countryside. It’s why programmes such as Kirstie Allsopp’s Homemade Home, which sells the satin-quilted bucolic dream, or Escape to the Country, are so popular.

Some 90% of us live in cities and more than half (57%) surveyed in the PrimeLocation.com Desirability Index said their dream house would be detached, in the countryside (33%), have good views (64%) and be near nice places to walk (44%).

PrimeLocation.com has developed a property search app for Android phones and we’re launching it today. The app is for the millions of smartphone users in the UK using Android handsets – such as the HTC Desire or Samsung Galalxy IIS  - and offers a clean and simple way to find your next prime location while on the move.

The app offers both traditional postcode or area name searches as well as a one-touch ‘my location’ search too. To download go to the Android Market on your phone and search for ‘primelocation’ and the app is free to install.

If you don’t have an Android phone but want to search while out and about then one alternative is the PrimeLocation.com iPad app, launched last year to much acclaim and already downloaded 150,000 times.

It’s a familiar story in today’s Prime property market – a Cheshire mansion bought for £1.85 million in 2007, bull-dozed, re-built and put on the market for £5 million. Two years and a price drop later Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff has finally sold his Prestbury pile – to another sports star, footballer Peter Crouch.

Apart from the set of cricket wickets carved above the front door and a mosaic of the Ashes urn in the swimming pool, this is the type of uber-luxurious house that was built for a footballer – even though it was actually built by a cricketer.

Flintoff bought the plot in October 2007 from ex-Fulham football manager Mark Hughes and after fights with locals and an initially refused planning application, he was able to knock down the existing property and build a six bedroom mansion akin to others on one of the UK’s most expensive streets, Withinlee Road, AKA Footballer’s Alley.

The house was designed for Flintoff family life and includes a large pool plus a smaller one for their three children. It also has a luxury gym and home cinema but the Flintoffs never lived in their made-to-measure home. Instead, they turned their attention to the dizzying heights of Dubai and their Cheshire mansion has waited patiently for two years for a buyer.

Despite being in Prestbury – the centre of footballer land (the Rooneys, Ferdinand and Tevez all live nearby) – Freddie wasn’t bowled over with offers for his £5 million pad. And only after changing estate agents, dropping the asking price by £500,000 – the price of a decent size house to most – plus the luck of footballer Peter Crouch moving Clubs, has the house finally sold.

Crouch is transferring from Tottenham Hotspur to Stoke City and moving up North with his new wife, Abbey Clancy and their six month old daughter and we have no doubt the house will suit the star couple’s needs perfectly, model Abbey will surely love the huge walk-in wardrobe (pictured above) and the WAG neighbours.

So you’ve got a supercar in your garage. Maybe it’s a Ferrari, perhaps an Aston Martin and if you are a fully fledged Clarksonite, possibly a Bugatti Veyron.

It’s a massive asset sitting in your garage slowly gathering dust and depreciating in value. So if cash flow is a problem in your life and you don’t have the £50,000 required to put a deposit down on your yearned-for holiday home in somewhere like Sandbanks, for example, then a specialist and upmarket pawnbroker has set up shop to help out.

Supercars lined the street in London's Mayfair

London based firm TGS suggests that, rather than sell your beloved lean machine to finance the deal, why not just pawn it? More sensitive souls might call it asset-based short term lending, but TGS says it’s just a way to get your hands on cash quickly without involving a bank.

The credit crunch has seen business expand rapidly for the firm as banks have become reluctant to lend on property transactions, even when their clients are wealthy.

Paul Zimbler, who runs TGS and has 14 shops across the capital, says he spotted this gap in the lending market by mistake. Customers had been coming to him for ‘title’ lending – which is when the borrower keeps the car but takes out a small, short-term loan against its value – but notice clients looking to borrow larger sums.

Paul says he then offered to keep the car in return for a larger loan. TGS will lend up to 70% of a vehicle’s value and loans can be for up to seven months – although typically they last one to three.

Recent deals Paul says he’s completed include £60,000 leant against an Aston Martin, £40,000 against a Porsche 911 and £100,000 against a new Bentley, all of which were used to finance property purchases. Most people use the service to pay unexpected bridging loans, finance the costs of moving home including stamp duty, or put down deposits.

The bricks-and-mortar world of home ownership is many things, but seldom is it portrayed as a moral maze. But Primelocation’s brief talk with a friend over coffee yesterday revealed how dramatically people’s ethics are left at the front door when the home buying process is in full swing. Apologies for the unromantic tone of this blog on or around St Valentine’s Day.

Going behind people's backs: Can property buying lead to immoral behaviour?

My friend, let’s call him Mark, is selling his three bedroom 1960s semi in a quiet but not overly desirable suburb of south west London. It’s a buy to let investment forced on him last year by the soft local market – by which he means he couldn’t sell it so remortgaged, rented it out and bought his next home regardless. But now he’s keen to sell up as finances are tight and is keen to find a buyer – fast.

Viewings are not a problem for Mark’s currently empty ex-abode (the tenants were ejected to aid the sale) and last week eight were lined up for the weekend which, given the current market, was a promising start. But early on in the week one man said he was so keen to buy the house (which was on the market for £249,950) that he offered just under the asking price but requested, crucially, that he house be taken off the viewings treadmill.

Mark and his wife agonized over this for in the middle of a recession, who wants to turn down viewings?  But the buyer insisted. So off the market the property came and promises of financial fidelity ensued from both sides.

The weekend came and went but on Monday morning (today) the buyer phoned and confessed to a lapse – he had been seeing other properties and had decided to move in with someone else, he confessed and grovelled. Mark had lost a buyer and some seven or eight viewings and is now entirely averse to being led up the garden path, so to speak, by unfaithful potential partners in property.

But should you take your property off the market once a verbal offer is made, as Mark did?  The answer is definitely not and puts the balance of power even more heavily in the buyer’s favour.  But one question  my friend’s angst begs is why successive government’s over the decades – despite several failed attempts including Labour’s HIPs – have so happily encouraged or condoned betrayal on such a vast and expensive scale.

Why can’t we simply use the French system? Once you make an offer it’s binding and only subsequent planning or structural faults can break the promise, and the process moves forward to a sale. It would, at the very least,  cut out the naughtiness that my friend Mark has had to endure.

The infographic (as graphs have come to be called) included below in this blog doesn’t look at first glance as if it’s particularly interesting. Just a load of dry old blue lines wobbling across the seasons and years.

But I would urge you to look at it because, as you may realise, it reveals the unusual but rhythmic nature of Britain’s property market over the past six years. I came across this while looking at house hunting trends in Winchester, but it could be anywhere in the UK. It’s clearly shows how powerful the surge of home hunting is during the Autumn market.

Agents tend to pray for a strong ‘Autumn market’ but for home sellers and buyers it reveals how important it is to get ready for this late August to early November window, which I guess is the equivalent to the old ‘number plate registration’ for new car sales.

What what no one seems to really know why it happens. Is it Brits coming back from holiday and deciding to get stuck into their home move; the school term calendar; people’s desire to move before the Christmas festivities begin or simply the last chance to sell before Britain returns to the long Winter months of gloom?

Any agents, buyers or sellers with any ideas do post them in the comments box below – if you’ve got time, that is.

Too many for sale? How can there be so many homes for sale but no buyers?

After this blog last month started a healthy debate both here and on Twitter, let’s take it to the next level. House price analysts say a glut of homes on sale and falling numbers of buyers are causing small price drops now, with perhaps more to come.

But if people buy and sell at the same time, as most surely do, why are demand and supply out of line?

The mismatch
The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors says in mid-2007, before the credit crunch, estate agents typically sold 45% of their stock every three months. That fell to 15% in mid-2008 before rising to 30% early this year.

But now, with more homes on sale, the sale-to-stock ratio is back down to 24%.

Exploding a myth
This increased supply suggests that in reality selling and buying do not necessarily happen simultaneously. There is a small but important time gap.

Research by Santander says 1.1m homes in Brtain were put on the market in the year to  August but did not sell, often because would-be buyers could not get a mortgage.

Some estate agents say that as a result, more sellers now wait to find a purchaser before registering as buyers themselves to avoid spending time and energy finding a dream home only to lose it because they cannot sell their old property.

“Supply and demand balance over time but there’s always a lag, never an exact balance. A year ago there were more buyers but fewer homes, so prices rose. Now it’s the reverse” says Lucian Cook, research guru at estate agent Savills.

In addition the new-build sector, which slumped in 2008 and 2009, is recovering and adds 120,000 new properties on sale per year without creating new buyers.

Dying, divorcing but not buying
A further factor is probate sales; elderly owners die and their properties are sold by relatives who already own homes – so they inherit the proceeds and do not buy. Land Registry figures show that in 2007 some 7% of deals were probate sales. But now, with home sales halved but death rates static, they account for 15% of the market.

There are also 120,000 divorces a year. Analysis by Savills shows that in a third of cases the couple sell their home and, at first, each person rents before buying later.

In the past these ‘sell-but-not-buy’ figures have been balanced or outweighed by first time buyers, who purchase with nothing to sell. But tougher mortgage conditions and average deposits rising to £35,000 mean FTB numbers are 50% of the level in 2007.

Let’s see if that starts a debate.

One of the worst parts of moving house is tackling all the packing that needs to be done. But while your primary focus will be on what you need to pack, don’t forget to think about what you need to leave behind too.

You may well have already stated any main items you plan to leave behind when you put your house on the market, such as carpets or kitchen appliances, plus extra negotiations may have taken place with the buyers for additional items to be left, such as curtains or fittings. But apart from the fixtures and fittings, there are other items that need to be left behind for the new owners.

Keys are of course one of them (essential for getting in!), but it’s not just the door keys and any spare sets that should be left. If you’ve got locks on any windows in your home, you need to ensure these are left behind, and if you’ve got a side gate that locks, internal doors with locks or a garage, then keys for all these doors needs to left behind too. If you’re feeling really keen, you could also label them, as finding a bunch of random keys and not knowing what they belong to can be a tad confusing for new owners.

The other thing you should remember to leave behind is any instruction booklets for household appliances. If you’ve agreed to leave kitchen appliances, then this includes things like the cooker, fridge or washing machine. Also vitally important are instructions for the boiler, fire and any alarms that might be fitted.

These are very easily overlooked, but won’t be much use for you to take with you and could prove tricky for new owners to be without. In the case of gas fires, for example, a new rule brought in by British Gas in the last few years means that engineers are not allowed to service a gas fire unless they have an instruction leaflet. Home owners with relatively new gas fires may not find this a problem, as instruction leaflets can be obtained with a little research, but for those with older fires that are no longer manufactured, or produced by defunct companies, being stuck without any instructions means no service is possible, or at least not from British Gas.

Another handy piece of information to leave behind is your local council refuse guide (usually send out to you once a year) detailing when the refuse and recycling collections will be made each week – and, of course, the bins themselves!

Any other suggestions for things to leave behind? Or have you experienced some strange things left behind in your new home?