Burgess Hill’s continuing
housing shortage is putting the town’s (and the Country’s) repute as a nation
of homeowners ‘under threat’,
as the number of houses being built continues to be woefully inadequate in meeting
the ever demanding needs of the growing population in the town. In
fact, I was talking to my parents the other day at a family get together; the
subject of the Burgess Hill Property market came up in the conversation (as I
am sure it does at many family parties in Burgess Hill) after the weather and
politics. My parents said it used to be that if you went out to work and did
the right thing, you would expect that relatively quickly over the course of
your career you would be buying a house, you would go on
holiday every year and you would save for a pension. But now things seem to have changed.
Back in the autumn, George Osborne, used the autumn statement
to double the housing budget to £2bn a
year from April 2018 in an attempt to increase supply and deliver 100,000
new homes each year until 2020. The
Chancellor also introduced a series of initiatives to help get first time
buyers on the housing ladder, including the contentious Help to Buy Scheme and
extending Right to Buy from not just Council tenants, but to Housing
Association tenants as well.
Now that does all sound rather good, but the Country
is only building 137,490 properties a year (split down 114,250 built by private
builders, 21,560 built by Housing Associations and and a paltry 1,680 council
houses). If you look at the graph below (courtesy of ONS), you
will see nationally, the last time the country was building 230,000 houses a
year was in the 1960’s.
How George is going to almost double house building
overnight, I don’t know, because using the analogy of a greengrocers; if people
want to buy more apples (i.e. houses)
in a greengrocers’ shop, giving them more money (i.e. with the Help to Buy scheme) when there's not enough apples in
the first place doesn't really help.
Looking at the Burgess Hill house building figures, in
the local authority area as a whole, only 380 properties were built in the last
12 months, split down into 280 privately built properties and 100 housing
association with not one council house being built. This is
simply not enough and the shortage of supply has meant Burgess Hill property
values have continued to rise, meaning they are 7.6% higher than 12 months ago,
rising 0.6% in the last month alone.
I was taught at school (all those years
ago!), that it’s all about supply and demand, this economics game. The demand for Burgess Hill property has been
particularly strong for properties in the good areas of the town and it is my
considered opinion that it is likely to continue this year, driven by growing
demand among buyers (both Burgess Hill home buyers and Burgess Hill landlords
alike). You see Burgess Hill’s economy is quite varied, meaning activity
is expected to remain relatively strong into the early summer of 2016,
especially as some Burgess Hill buy to let landlords try to complete purchases
ahead of the introduction of new stamp duty rules next week.
In addition the issue of supply, well we
have spoken about the lack of new building in the town holding things back, but
there is another issue relating to supply. Of the existing properties already
built, the concern is the number of properties on the market and for sale. The
number of properties for sale in January in Burgess Hill was 101, whilst 12
months previous that figure was 11. Four years ago, it stood at 273, a massive drop!
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