This was followed by Spain, the Caribbean, New Zealand and Canada. Responding to continued demand for property in Spain, Banco Halifax Hispania will increase its number of branches from 14 to 20 by the end of 2006 - with the first branch expansion planned to open in Mallorca (its first branch away from mainland Spain).

Specialist lender HIFX recently released figures from its third Global Property Hot Spots survey which show that transactions for Australia made up 11% of all enquiries, with Canada, Bulgaria and New Zealand taking the top spots. HIFX's second market report in February showed that enquiries for Australia leapt from one sixteenth to just under a fifth. Spain and France still represent 43% of enquiries this month however.

Based on renewed interest from domestic and foreign buyers, Australia's major cities are picking up. February figures from Australian Property Monitors show that clearance rates at auctions in Melbourne were 60%, up 10% on the same time last year. Clearance rates in Sydney were at 54%, a rise of almost 14%, with total sales worth $71 million (compared to $54 million at the same time last year).

A property expert from Macquarie Bank, Rod Cornish, recently told the Urban Development Institute of Australia congress in Adelaide that prices in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane had stabilised and predicted an upturn over the next 18 months. However, he also said that an upturn in the market will encourage the Reserve Bank to raise interest rates (by a quarter of a per cent) - although this would only be temporary.

Stable interest rates have kick-started markets in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide and demand for high end housing has been cited as a key indicator of a recovery. Cornish also commented that Brisbane was stabilising as fewer people moved from New South Wales to Queensland, easing demand, and Perth and Darwin were in a period of high growth, due to a booming resource sector.

Interstate immigration and a changing population is driving, and cooling, demand. The Australian newspaper has just highlighted findings from Adelaide University demographer Dianne Rudd who called for developers to build more diverse housing estates to cope with the changing population - saying there is a need for housing for smaller families and single parents, rather than the four-bedroom developments.

"Developers or anyone who's doing strategic housing needs to look at diversity and flexibility," Dr Rudd said. "What people aren't watching enough is the changing family structure - there's less stability, with more single-parent families."

Census figures suggest that Australians moved houses regularly, as Dr Rudd concluded: "We have a very high mobile population - 44% of people changed their residence between the 1996 and 2001 census. And 17% said they changed their address in the year before the census."