Housing sales are perking up and prices are rising faster than at anytime since their 2006 peak, outstripping inflation for a third month in a row in June. In London, a market fuelled by foreign money, prices are increasing by over 8% a year. But even in the supposedly desolate north-east, surveyors report that the number of potential buyers is rising at its fastest rate since August 1999.
Does this mean the age of austerity is finally drawing to a close? Sadly not.
Rather, there is an election on the horizon. The incumbent government generally does best when prices are rising. Far more voters already own their homes than identify as struggling first-time buyers worrying about being priced out of the market. And even those first-time buyers are now snapping up homes once more, thanks partly to the government's controversial Help to Buy scheme.
Rising house prices may be a relief to the government but more important will be the desperate need to keep interest rates down, even if it means that voters approaching retirement are furious about the collapse of annuity rates.
The government is still running a larger deficit, in terms of the overall size of the economy, than any rich country apart from Japan and the total stock of public debt is still growing inexorably. To cover it, the government needs to borrow, month in, month out. Up to now, it has been lucky.
Unlike the southern eurozone countries, most of which are now adding to their stock of public debt more slowly than we are, Britain can borrow relatively cheaply at 2.5%, compared with 4 to 5% for Italy. The markets haven't gone for us yet, but this can't continue.
Sooner or later, the debt has to stop growing as a share of the economy. If the economy continues to chug along, that will certainly help. In fact, the gloom and doom about the economy was always overdone, as anyone who looked at real world numbers would have noticed: for a year and more, car sales have been increasing, new jobs have been being created and national insurance payments have been on the rise.
But by the same token, the relief today is probably too strong. Many problems in our economy still need to be fixed.
Above all, we need to rethink what we want from public spending, which now by default is increasingly concentrated on the protected areas of health and pensions. Reviving the housing market is easy compared with that.
Frances Cairncross is head of Exeter College, University of Oxford. She will be speaking at the National Housing Federation annual conference in Birmingham in September. Register your place here
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