Housebuilding Shortage

There was an interesting article in the Sunday Times 2/11/14 by Kate Barker, a former member of the monetary policy committee. She writes:

"House prices will remain high and continue to rise over the long term as supply remains restricted, we should be building 220,000 new homes a year but since 2008 it has been half of that number, even for 5 years before the crisis in 2008 the average was only 160,000 new homes a year. That means even in the last decade we are 900,000 homes short."

LivEco believes the problem is not only the quantity of new homes being built - it is also the type of new homes being built. The second graph shows that most of the supply of new homes is now concentrated amongst the large PLC National Housebuilders, as the number of small builders / developers has dropped dramatically. This restricts variation and difference in the supply of new homes and it is due in most part to expensive land prices, a long and protracted planning process and the difficulty of obtaining development finance from banks.

We need to have a strong independent small developer sector building houses in this country, otherwise in 20 years time when you drive through our towns all the houses will look the same, a slow death of our architectural heritage.

LivEco believe choice in housing supply is good and we are doing our best to counter this trend. We have just built and sold our 1st phase of 9 homes at Great House Farm and will be building our second phase of 21 homes next year.

If you are interested in living in an architecturally designed home that is fuel efficient and cheap to run then email us your details and we will keep in touch when we launch our next phase - from 2 bedroom to 4 bedroom houses all in a semi rural community around a medieval pond - coming in 2015.