Fewer people than usual will be taking out a mortgage next year, Rics said.
The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics) expects big house price falls across 2009, negatively affecting the mortgage market.
According to the surveyors, the decline will mean that the value of the typical UK home will drop by 25 percent over the course of the downturn. Figures from Halifax and Nationwide both suggest that house prices have already fallen by around 15 percent over the last 12 months.
The credit crunch, which began in 2007 and has severely restricted first-time buyers' access to cheap mortgage loans, is largely to blame for the house price decline. Previous slack lending practices at banks - denounced as "crazy" by the deputy governor of the Bank of England last week - have also been blamed for stoking the property bubble in the first place.
Rics said that, as a consequence of the downturn, mortgage approvals levels are over 60 percent down on last year. The organisation's chief economist Simon Rubinsohn said: "Lenders are likely to remain cautious in the near term in the absence of any 'guarantees' on mortgage backed securities.
"This, coupled with an increasingly gloomy economic picture, suggests that house prices will continue to decline in 2009."
Analysis from the International Monetary Fund suggests that the UK property market was as much as 30 percent overvalued at its peak.
