This paper offers an interpretation of how housing markets work which complements more traditional economic approaches. Building on a wider movement within cultural economy and economic sociology, it considers how (housing) markets are variously performed in the power-filled negotiations of buyers, sellers and market professionals. This is part of a larger undertaking, but here the focus is particularly on the role of legal, financial and information intermediaries in shaping local cultures of property exchange. This is a social rather than economic analysis of housing markets; it is a qualitative rather than a quantitative study. It is designed to shed light on how markets are made, though it might, in the end, change the way they are modelled.