By the time the UK housing market hits bottom, a few of the housebuilders may have been carried out feet first. Attention has naturally focused on the most sickly, such as Barratt Developments, but all have seen their share prices plummet. So who will survive and what will be left of them?

Tony Pidgely, the managing director of Berkeley Group, remains a man to watch. During the last downturn, he was one of the few who took the opportunity to snap up land at depressed prices. Since 2004, Berkeley has focused on profitability, shunning the chase for ever-higher volumes.
So, even while Berkeley’s market capitalisation has halved in the past year to £900m, it trades at a semi-respectable six times consensus earnings. At the end of June, the almost debt-free group announced that it would defer a planned return of about £400m cash to investors, preferring to spend it on cheap land.