Property used to be the place you wanted if you had a bit of money, and wanted a lot.

Buoyed up by the seemingly limitless rise in house prices, and made trendy by a slew of daytime TV shows, a property portfolio became the thing to have for the upwardly-mobile.

A generation of entrepreneurs sank their money into property firms, lured in by the huge profits on offer.

But all that changed as banks started to withdraw the easy mortgages that had propelled house prices to such unimaginable heights.

The  collapse of Steve Dodd's LandMarque Custom Homes  makes him the latest property mogul to be hit by the caustic effects of the credit crunch on the previously unrestrained housing market.

Earlier this month, prominent property entrepreneur Damien Siviter saw his firm, Regal Executive Homes, go into liquidation after about a year as a house-builder. At its peak the company had a property portfolio worth about £90 million, and the entrepreneur was living a millionaire’s life of private jets and chauffeured cars.

But it was brought down by the credit crunch, with the multi-million pound firm ruined by the lack of activity in the housing market.

And last year, another big business name – former Birmingham Chamber president Rod Ackrill – was brought down by the stricken housing market.

Mr Ackrill had to defy doctors’ orders and go into the office to deal with the collapsing finances of part of his Chase business empire – building firm Chase Norton Construction. But the businessman could not save it, and saw the £40 million company collapse because of lack of interest in the market.

In the case of LandMarque going into administration, it had been thought housing companies would be recession-proof, with the high end of the market – and the LandMarque properties were expected to reach more than £1.5 million when they went on sale – originally thought to be less affected by the lack of easy mortgages that had paralysed so much of the rest of the market.

But the company’s failure was a sign the malaise in the property market had spread to almost every part of the sector.

Steve Turner, of the Home Builders Federation, said: “I don’t think it’s the top end of the market or the bottom end, I don’t think it’s fair to say that at all any more, all sectors of the market are affected now, no matter who you are it’s difficult to get a mortgage.”

He said house-builders were unlikely to free up sites for development with selling conditions the way they are, meaning that when things improved in the future there might not be enough houses to deal with demand – a perennial problem for the UK’s under-pressure housing sector. “Mortgages are the primary issue,” he said. “ If you look at some of the figures that have come out the interest is still there but the lack of mortgage availability is meaning people can’t buy the houses that they want to.

“The knock-on impact of that is that house-builders can’t make houses so we have seen a drop in housing output.”

He said the only solution was for the Government to make mortgages available again somehow to get the market moving. “The Government now has significant interests in the banks and need to make sure they return to a sensible level of lending,” he said.

“Both the PM and the chancellor have said they want to see the banks extend mortgages – we need to see those steps being taken. In addition to that they can use public money to pump prime sites, because the builders are unwilling to put sites forward at the moment because they can’t sell them.

“When the Government came in one of the promises was to say we need three million new homes by 2020. That wasn’t a figure picked out of the air.

“In Birmingham a lot of redevelopment has been driven by new flats, which have driven people back into the city centre. There’s a lot of issues in play here and all parties need to be working together.”

And he said that meeting demand for homes might mean the Government having to relax rules on development so targets could be reached. The Government has been trying to tackle the lack of housing with sustainable “eco-town” developments. But Mr Turner said this was still not enough, adding: “We need housing, full stop, whether it’s in an eco-town or not. We need to see a planning system that delivers enough land to build the houses the country needs otherwise we are going to see social issues down the line.

“It’s up to the Government to make sure land is available. These demands of the sector in terms of ‘50 per cent has to be affordable’, and about carbon emissions, they are all very positive wishes but if you ask for too much, the developers won’t be able to afford it.

“We need to have a fundamental rethink of how we are going to deliver houses in the future – if we don’t supply the land you are not going to see the houses that the country needs.

“This is not all about the credit crunch but it has certainly brought all of that into focus.”

> LandMarque calls in administrators >