By Linton Chiswick

LONDON (Citywire) - The only certain and true thing about the residential property market is that somebody, somewhere always has the statistic you need to illustrate the most unlikely and contrarian assertion.

Example? Buy-to-let's really picking up at the moment. No, really, it is.

Okay, if you skim the papers, it looks as if it's been a bad few weeks for the sector. Grant Bovey handed Imagine Homes over to HBOS. Once the UK's biggest buy-to-let business, under Bovey Imagine bought millions of pounds of property all over the world and sold it on, with rental guarantees, to landlords. Last year it lost millions of pounds. This October it's in the hands of its creditors.

Guest Invest, the buy-to-let hotel room business familiar to anybody who glances at the advertising billboards in London's Tube, and another HBOS borrower, was in the hands of the administrator by the beginning of the month.

Buy-to-let mortgages are vanishing. With impeccable timing, the taxman has announced a new initiative to exame stamp duty records and information from lettings agents to uncover landlords who haven't been declaring rental incomes or capital gains.

Even the so-called King and Queen of buy-to-let, two teachers from Kent who bought more than 900 properties, sometimes as many as several a day, have announced they're switching vendor-side… although they won't, luckily for south east England, be unloading their entire portfolio at once.

Even the recent government cash injection and the associated interest rate cut largely failed to bring a smile to buy-to-let investors as the rate cut failed to reach the consumer and the cash failed to reach specialist lenders.

All this matters because you don't need a professional interest to be affected by the state of buy-to-let.