Over the summer, the eurozone crisis dominated financial headlines. As share prices plummeted, reports drew comparisons to the Lehman Brothers crash in 2008 and speculated that similar events may be brewing.

The autumn is normally a hectic time for the mortgage market.

September would normally bring feverish activity with lenders doing their best to make sure their new mortgage products are best placed to generate the volumes needed to meet new lending targets at the year end.

This year, new product launches have been thin on the ground and there has been as much retrenchment as there has been progress.

Mortgage approvals have gradually been rising, but are still a long way from the highs of the days before the 2008 crisis.

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August figures from the Bank of England showed that lenders granted around 108,000 loans – higher than the previous six months, but still almost two-thirds less than the 269,000 loans in August 2007.

It can be surmised that the daily coverage of the euro crisis has caused further anxiety to consumers who were already worried about the future.

This, coupled with little movement in prices and high deposit requirements, has caused most homeowners to choose to sit on their hands, when they might previously have been tempted to test the market.

In addition, low interest rates mean more affordable repayments, so homeowners who might otherwise have struggled have avoided becoming forced sellers.

This has supported house prices and left fewer homes on offer for those first-time buyers that have managed to get an adequate deposit to secure a mortgage.

The result is a very slow moving housing market.

With the start of October and decisions being reached on the Greek bailout, levels of uncertainty seem to have peaked for the present and share prices are starting to see some improvement again.

One would hope these changes will mean that concerns for homeowners and buyers will ease, but this remains to be seen.

Despite the slightly better news flow, the euro crisis still remains in the headlines, prices are flat or trending down and deposit requirements remain the same.

Unless we see a surge of new products onto the market by lenders very soon, the appetite of buyers put off by the crisis will remain the same and potential sellers will continue to stay put.

In order to see this surge of products, the government needs to step up on the promises made during the recent party conferences.

Injecting funding into the housing market cannot cure the crisis, but should certainly help increase availability and levels of confidence for lenders and buyers alike.

John Heron is chairman of the Intermediary Mortgage Lenders Association (IMLA)