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It all feels eerily reminiscent of how the financial crisis got under way in 2007.

Funds with billions of pounds tied up in commercial property, such as offices and retail parks, have had to pull down the shutters to prevent investors from withdrawing their money or applied so-called 'fair value adjustments', in other words, a cut the price at which the fund is valued.

They include the property funds run by household names such as M&G Investments, Aviva Investors, Standard Life Investments, Columbia Threadneedle, Henderson Global Investors, Aberdeen Asset Management and Canada Life.

Today, F&C became the latest to act.

They have done so following a following the shock referendum vote, which has triggered concerns in some quarters of a property crash.

Normally, when investors seek to cash in their funds and have their savings returned to them, it is no problem for the fund manager.

Stock or bond funds are crammed with assets that are easily tradable - or liquid, in the jargon - and readily converted to cash.

That is not the case, though, for commercial property funds.

The assets in which they are invested cannot simply be sold overnight to raise cash.

Nor can they easily assess the value of those assets from day to day.

Unlike, for example, a two-year UK gilt or shares of Vodafone, where a price is readily obtainable during trading hours, it is far harder to obtain an up-to-the-minute valuation of, say, an office block in Leeds city centre or a designer retail outlet in Bridgend.

Moreover, these funds in some cases have not had large cash buffers to instantly meet requests from investors to cash in their savings.

So these funds have had little choice but to prevent investors from getting their hands on their cash straightaway.

Accordingly, the situation has drawn parallels with the onset of the financial crisis, where one of the first harbingers that all was not well was a decision by Bear Stearns - which later collapsed - stopped investors taking money out of two of its hedge funds that had invested in mortgage-backed securities.

BNP Paribas, France's biggest bank, took similar action with one of its money market funds and, shortly after that, the run on Northern Rock got under way.

But it is important to stress that there are differences with what happened in 2007.

The first is that, while some of the assets owned by these property funds will have undoubtedly fallen in value, they are still of a decent quality and are, in a worst case scenario, sellable.

These are not portfolios of sub-prime mortgages that are impossible to value even if anyone were interested in buying them.

Another difference is that the property funds do not have the debts that they did at previous market peaks that meant, when assets were liquidated at a loss, investors took a hit because the funds were unable to repay their debts.

Another difference between the current sell-off and the financial crisis is that there is still demand for quality property assets.

Occupancy levels of office blocks in prime locations, such as central London, are high and that should mitigate against a big crash in the value of such assets.

And there is one more crucial difference: the Brexit vote is a localised issue rather than a global market event.

That said, there will be fears that this wave of redemption requests will force some funds to start selling assets, potentially sparking a wider sell-off in the commercial property market.

There is also a sense that the commercial property market had started to get a little too frothy: until around nine months ago, the share prices of some big commercial property companies were exceeding the net asset values, the sum that could be raised were all the assets liquidated.

There is a lesson for investors in all of this.

Property funds may offer a reasonable return - indeed, the yield they offered was a reason for their increasing popularity while prevailing interest rates have been low in recent years - but there is a risk attached to them.

They can be volatile and, when lots of investors head for the exit at the same time, these funds cannot sell their assets in an orderly manner.

The main advice for anyone at the moment, though, has to be to sit tight.

If you own units in these property funds and you don't need to sell, don't.