Bank fortunes key for Savills

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"Trading conditions in many commercial investment markets, particularly in the UK and US, have clearly been challenging in the last few months," Savills said.

"The outlook for our UK and US commercial investment, UK residential and UK mortgage broking businesses will inevitably depend on how quickly confidence returns to financial markets."

However, it added that the strong first half of the year and decent trading at the top end of the London housing market will help it make full-profits of more than £80 million.

"The prime UK residential markets have proved more resilient to the credit squeeze than lower-priced markets," the company said.

"While the stream of negative news coming from the financial sector affected prices and volumes in the final quarter, prices at the top end remained relatively firm."

Meanwhile, statistics from Property Data, an independent market monitor, show how the crisis sparked by the subprime lending fiasco and global credit crunch hit commercial property transactions in the final quarter of 2007, down 72% year-on-year and a nosedive of 63% from the three months up to the end of September.

It is the worst performance by the commercial property market since the end of 2000 when the stock market was in the grip of the bears following the boom in technology shares.

The value of commercial property transactions totalled £5.5 billion in the three months to the end of December against £15 billion in the third quarter of 2007 and more than £20 billion in the previous year's comparable period, Property Data said.

"The market has frozen since the middle of the third quarter," the firm added.