housing supply

UK homeowners forced to settle for below asking price, Zoopla says

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Is this a short term blip in the relentless growth of house prices or does it presage an inflation driven longer term change? Methinks it’s the latter, until we significantly increase the stock of housing the scales will always be tilted in favour of the house owner….

People selling their homes have typically had to settle for below the asking price in recent weeks, according to Zoopla, which is predicting house prices will fall by about 5% next year.

The average price achieved in recent weeks has been 3% below a seller’s asking price, when for much of 2021 and the first half of this year it matched the asking price, the property website said. Zoopla said it expects discounts to increase further in 2023.

Since the start of September, one in nine homes have had their original asking price reduced by 5% or more, Zoopla said, and a quarter have had the price cut to some degree, according to the index covering the month of October.

Asking price reductions are greatest in southern England, where sales volumes have fallen the most, with almost one in three homes in the south-east and east of England reducing asking prices to attract demand, the report said.

Annual house price growth slowed to 7.8% last month, down from 8.1% in September and the lowest since November 2021, according to Zoopla data. Demand has fallen 44% since September’s disastrous mini-budget, which drove mortgage rates sharply higher and led to hundreds of deals being pulled from the market.

New sales have dropped by up to 50% in previous hotspots and areas where higher mortgage rates will hit buying power hardest – in southern England, east Midlands and Wales. Sales have fallen less in more affordable areas and in London where market conditions have been weaker. Zoopla expects mortgage rates to fall to about 5% at the turn of the year, from about 6% now for two-year and five-year fixed deals.

We can build enough homes for everyone in England. So why don’t we?

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If you read this article in full you will get some fascinating insights as to why we don’t have enough houses in rural England. It tells us:

Whichever new prime minister emerges, current Conservative politics makes it unlikely we’ll see a significant new expansion of social rented housing any time soon. But not so long ago another Conservative prime minister, Theresa May, talked of the need for “a new generation of council homes to help fix our broken housing market”. Opposition parties and the UK’s devolved governments remain committed to a large increase in public housing. Meanwhile, there are still an estimated 1.6m households in England with unmet housing needs best provided by social renting. As we plan for the future, now is a good time to ask what we can learn from past social housing schemes.

The most important lesson is simply that we can build social housing at scale when the political will exists. Between 1945 and 1979, the country built an average of 126,000 council homes annually. The largest number built in a single year, 219,000, was achieved by a Conservative government in 1953. At times, that pace and scale could be problematic. Financial constraints frequently limited the best of what might have been achieved. There were perhaps too many poorly constructed high-rise dwellings, too many large and anonymous suburbs, but the overriding goal – when, even in 1948, 54% of British households lacked their own bathroom – was to house all our people decently and clear the slums.

Councils in England are failing to use new powers to block shoddy housing schemes

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Whilst most of the examples here are urban I can think of some very bad rural examples. This story tells us:

A survey revealed last year that 41% of councils do not employ any urban designers, and 76% lack access to any advice on architecture.

The change to the country’s planning rules was part of a package of measures that ministers claimed would ensure new housing was “beautiful and well-designed”. The government is setting up an “Office for Place” to help “communities encourage development they find beautiful, and refuse what they find ugly”.

The report, published by the UCL-based Place Alliance, highlights 12 schemes rejected on design grounds since last July. The inspectorate found proposals for an unattractive block of 15 flats on the site of a demolished car park in Crawley in West Sussex would offer “unsatisfactory living conditions”. Some flats had limited natural light and the outside spaces were close to roads and railway lines. Others lacked privacy as windows were next to people passing on a walkway and close to cars queueing on a traffic gyratory system.

The inspectorate also backed Braintree district council’s efforts to block two estates on the edges of villages in Essex, where developers were trying to squeeze in large numbers of houses, jarring with houses nearby. Officials also turned down an appeal relating to five tower blocks on the former Westferry newspaper printworks site in east London. It was ruled the scheme – which led to a row about media mogul Richard Desmond’s contact with ministers tasked with planning decisions – would harm appreciation of the Greenwich world heritage site.

Body set up to police UK housebuilding not representative, say critics

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We now live in an era of relentless scrutiny of who is entitled to speak on issues rather than what the individuals say. I am sure there is some validity to these comments nonetheless. This story tells us:

A new government-backed body set up to police the building industry faces claims that it lacks representation from architects, ordinary homeowners and BAME communities whose Covid-19 death rates have been linked to poor housing standards.

Labour had claimed the New Home Quality Board [NHQB] lacked independence as it was chaired by a Tory MP and Conservative-linked developers sit on the board alongside her. On Friday it announced a new CEO and chair as it moved to what it described as its “full operational stage”.

The body has published a code of practice for the housebuilding industry and is working to oversee the creation of the New Homes Ombudsman Service, due to launch in the Summer, with the stated aim of providing “robust independent redress” for new-build buyers who have “issues with their new home or developer”.

However, the NHQB was criticised by Ben Derbyshire, a former president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, who questioned what he described as an “inexplicable absence of anyone with a design background or training on the board”.

“Design in British housing, especially speculative mass housing, is generally very poor. The exceptions to this represent the minority of housebuilding and renovation but these exceptions should become the rule. Good housing architects are notably absent from housebuilding and that is never going to change so long the profession is not represented on the New Homes Quality Board,” he said.

He expressed concern about the extent of representation of people from BAME communities on the board after the pandemic had showed up the correlation between poor housing standards, overcrowding, disadvantage and death from Covid among ethnic minorities.

Rural families struggle to find homes as holiday lets surge

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Good old CPRE….

Rural families are being deprived of housing by a 1,000% surge in the number of short-term lets and holiday properties, according to countryside charity CPRE.

The huge increase was revealed in a survey by the charity – formerly the Campaign to Protect Rural England – which looked at property tenures over a five-year period between 2016 and 2021.

It showed that 148,000 homes, stood empty for large parts of the year.  Most of them were in staycation hotspots, a CPRE spokesperson added.

“Our data shows startling figures in locations such as Cornwall, Devon, South Lakeland and Northumberland,” the spokesperson said.

In the survey of property listings between 2016 and 2021, South Lakeland saw a 1,231% increase in short-term lets.

About half the families on waiting lists for social housing in the area could be homed if the holiday rentals were available on the property market, the spokesperson suggested.

In Cornwall, where short-term lets grew by 661% to 15,000 over the five-year period, all of the 15,000 waiting families could be housed.

Crispin Truman, CPRE chief executive said there has been a massive shift into an unregulated short-term rentals market that didn’t exist six years ago.

Sort out housebuilding obstacles or miss target, Lords warn UK government

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We seem never to get this issue right, we seem always to be mired in controversy about the way forward. A new year seems to be bringing very little change to either of my previous statements. This article tells us:

Britain faces a housing crisis in the wake of the pandemic as confusion about planning rules and shortages of staff undermine government targets to build 300,000 homes a year, according to a House of Lords committee.

A retreat from housebuilding by smaller companies must be tackled by ministers to reduce the shortage of homes, the cross-party group of peers said.

“Too many people currently live in expensive, unsuitable and poor-quality homes, and housing supply needs to be increased now to tackle the housing crisis,” the committee said in its report, titled Meeting Housing Demand.

The housing secretary, Michael Gove, is expected to set out the government’s plans to kickstart housebuilding after the industry suffered the twin blows of Brexit, which reduced the amount of skilled labour available, and the upheaval caused by the pandemic.

Gove has indicated he will encourage employment and housing in the regions as part of the government’s levelling up agenda, though this is likely to be a long-term project.

Baroness Neville-Rolfe, chair of the Lords’ built environment committee, said: “The government’s ambitious target of 300,000 new homes a year will only be met if it takes action to remove the barriers for housebuilders, particularly for SMEs, which 35 years ago built 39% of new homes but now build just 10%.”

The committee was critical of a U-turn over proposed reforms to planning rules that would have divided areas into zones, some of which are reserved for conservation and others that have few or no rules holding back developers.

‘Immoral’ developers ‘targeting rural areas and refusing to build on brownfield sites’

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These sound like a well balanced (not) series of statements from CPRE. I wonder if its just developers who want to build in rural areas? I suspect it takes more than one side of the equation to make a market and after all when was the last time anyone under 25 got a mortgage in large swathes of rural England…..

Developers are “gorging” on greenfield sites in rural areas to build despite a record amount of brownfield land being available for construction, a charity has said.

A report by the CPRE, an organisation that aims to protect the countryside, said there is enough brownfield land in England to accommodate 1.3 million homes.

Despite this, CPRE said “wasteful and immoral” developers are choosing to concrete over greensites because it is cheaper. Emma Bridgewater, the charity’s president, is calling for councils and planners to take a “brownfield first policy”.

“We need to direct councils and developers to use these sites – often in town and city centres where housing need is most acute – before any greenfield land can be released,” she said.

“It is wasteful and immoral to abandon our former industrial heartlands where factories and outdated housing have fallen into disrepair. Developing brownfield is a win-win solution that holds back the tide of new buildings on pristine countryside and aids urban regeneration at a stroke.”

Popularity of countryside living causes rural rent increase

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Astonishing prices which leave me wondering how much people then have left to pay for anything else in rural settings. This story tells us:

The move towards countryside living is raising rural renting costs in Norfolk, says Rightmove.

Renters have turned their sights to the countryside, as homebuyers did before them.

New data from property website Rightmove shows that rental prices in rural and suburban areas in the UK have jumped 11pc compared to 2pc in urban areas.

Rightmove claims that this is due to a longing for outside space and separation from cities.

Rent prices in rural areas have risen by £122 a month, from £1,142 in February 2020 to £1,264 in October 2021.

Demand for rural homes is up 224pc and availability is down by 61pc, and demand for suburban homes is up 155pc and availability is down 45pc.

House prices: Young and low paid ‘priced out’ of tourist areas

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Reflecting on the previous story there is an interesting conundrum here! Coastal places have many challenges but their desirability from a residential perspective speaks directly to the point about their latent potential made by Chris Witty. The article tells us:

Young and low paid workers in tourist hotspots are increasingly being priced out of homes, new analysis has shown.

House prices rose up to three times faster in some rural and coastal areas compared to the national average in July, Office of National Statistics (ONS) figures have revealed.

North Devon has seen a rise of 22.5%, while the UK average rose by 8%.

A lack of affordable homes could be contributing to hospitality struggling to fill vacancies, the ONS said.

The average cost of rent in the south-west of England rose by 2.6% in the year leading to August, more than double the 1.2% increase for the UK as a whole.

The ONS said the growth in demand for rental properties “appears to be exceeding supply”.

It added the fall in supply of letting was most widespread in the South West, East and West Midlands.

The ONS said: “Rising house prices and private rents mean that some workers are at risk of being priced out of living in rural and coastal areas, contributing to skill shortages in the tourism and hospitality industries that their local economies rely on.”

One couple from Barnstaple say they have been looking for a new home for five months with no success.

Sarah-Jane and Lauren Tolley have three weeks to find somewhere to live after being asked to leave by their current landlady through a no-fault eviction.

Section 21 notices allow landlords to evict renters without a reason after their fixed-term tenancy period ends.

Ministers ‘to ditch overhaul of planning laws’ after criticism

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People in rural areas are not universally opposed to new housing development. I think that is pretty important context in relation to this story! Which tells us:

The government is reportedly backpedalling on its commitment to overhaul planning laws in order to accelerate infrastructure projects with a target of building 300,000 homes a year in England.

Part of the government’s “Project Speed”, the new planning laws were announced in the Queen’s speech with the target of modernising and simplifying the system and increasing the number of homes being planned by more than a third.

The planning reforms have been met with criticism from countryside campaigners, who said the changes would lead to the “suburbanisation” of green areas without delivering much-needed affordable housing.

News that the plans could be scrapped follows the Conservatives’ shock defeat in the Chesham & Amersham byelection to the Liberal Democrats in June, which was blamed by some Tory MPs on the new laws. In the run-up to the vote, the Lib Dem leader, Ed Davey, said that if his party gained the Buckinghamshire constituency, which had formerly been a safe seat for the Conservatives, it would be “a massive mandate for those of us who were campaigning against the planning reforms”.

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