On Tuesday, official figures released by the Bank of England revealed that owners of residential properties across UK had pumped the equivalent of about 2% of their post-tax earnings towards their homes in the current year's third quarter.

The figure, although encouraging, is still much further away from the peak of 2003, when homeowners boosted their income by nearly 8.5% after releasing funds that were tied to their homes.

Also, as revealed by the figure, the rate at which people were paying down their mortgage managed to slow for the third consecutive quarter of the year. During the first quarter, the level of loan repayments had hit their peak, when owners of houses injected funds worth a whopping 8.1 Billion Pounds back into their properties.

The focus of consumers, which is currently centered solely on paying down their mortgages, is in sharp contrast to the past few years, when people were busy releasing equity from their properties to garner funds needed for larger purchases.

Official figures have confirmed that since homeowners stopped unlocking equity, a development which happened in 2008's second quarter, a total repayment of 33.89 Billion Pounds has been recorded.