There is a ten per cent chance that the housing market in the UK will "crash", an economist has warned.

Simon Rubinsohn, chief economist at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics), said although he expected prices would not grow by the predicted three per cent and stay steady across the country over 12 to 15 months, there was a one-in-five chance that properties in London would fall by 20 per cent within a year.

He added that talk of a "crash" was appropriate and responsible.

Martin Weale, head of the National Institute for Economic Research, told the Daily Telegraph: "After such sharp rises you''d have to be very brave to predict there could be no fall. You could easily have a soft landing, where prices stagnate for a few years.

"There are as likely to be sharp falls as there is to be a stagnation," he added.

Last weekend, Nationwide predicting that house price growth would plummet by 50 per cent next year and revised its prediction for the rest of 2007 downwards, predicintg growth will fall to seven per cent by December.