27.4% Of Mid Sussex Homes Are One Person Households.

I was having an interesting chat with a Mid Sussex buy to let landlord the other day when the subject of size of households came up in conversation.  For those of you who read my Brexit article published on the morning after the referendum, one of the reasons on why I thought the Mid Sussex property market would, in the medium to long term, be OK, was the fact that the size of households in the 21^st Century was getting smaller – which would create demand for Mid Sussex Property and therefore keep property prices from dropping.

Looking at the stats going back to the early 1960’s, when the average number of people in a home was exactly 3, it has steadily over the years dropped by a fifth to today’s figure of 2.4 people per household. Doesn’t sound a lot, but if the population remained at the same level for the next 50 years and the we had the same 20% drop in household size, the UK would need to build an additional 5.28 million properties ( or 105,769 per year) .. When you consider the country is only building 139,800 properties a year it doesn’t leave much for people living longer and immigration. Looking closer to home in the Mid Sussex District Council area, the average number of occupants per household is 2.4 people

When we look at the current picture nationally and split it down into tenure types (i.e. owned, council houses and private renting, a fascinating picture appears.

The vast majority of homeowners who don’t have a mortgage are occupied by one or two people (81% in fact), although this can be explained as residents being older, with some members of the family having moved out, or a pensioner living alone.  People living on their own are more likely to live in a Council house (43%) and the largest households (those with 4 or more people living in them are homeowners with a mortgage – but again, that can be explained as homeowners with families tend to need a mortgage to buy. What surprised me was the even spread of private rented households and how that sector of population are so evenly spread across the occupant range – in fact that sector is the closest to the national average, even though they only represent a sixth of the population.

When we look at the Mid Sussex District Council figures for all tenures (Owned, Council and Private Rented) a slightly different picture appears:

1 person households in Mid Sussex	2 person households in Mid Sussex	3 person households In Mid Sussex	4 person households in Mid Sussex	5+ person households in Mid Sussex
27.47%	35.40%	15.85%	15.12%	6.16%

But it gets even more interesting when we focus on just private rental properties in Mid Sussex, as it is the rental market in Mid Sussex that really fascinates me. When I analysed those Mid Sussex District Council private rental household composition figures, a slightly different picture appears. Of the 6,719 Private rental properties in the Mid Sussex District Council area,

·         31.5% of Private Rental Properties are 1 person Households

·         34.6% of Private Rental Properties are 2 person Households

·         16.8% of Private Rental Properties are 3 person Households

·         11.6% of Private Rental Properties are 4 person Households

·            5.3% of Private Rental Properties are 5+ person Households

     As you can see, Mid Sussex is not too dissimilar from the national picture but there is story to tell. If you are considering future buy to let purchases in the coming 12 to 18 months, I would seriously consider looking at 2 bed apartments/houses. Even with the numbers stated, there are simply not enough 2 bed apartments/houses to meet the demand. They have to be in the right part of Mid Sussex and priced realistically, but they will always let and when you need to sell, irrespective of market conditions at the time, will always be the target of buyers.

9,300 People Live In Every Square Mile of Haywards Heath – Is Haywards Heath Over Crowded?

Haywards Heath is already in the clutches of a population crisis that has now started to affect the quality of life of those living in Haywards Heath. There are simply not enough homes in Haywards Heath to house the greater number of people wanting to live in the town.

To start with, the UK has roughly 1,065 people per square mile – the second highest in Europe. The total area of Haywards Heath itself is 3.612 square miles and there are 33,800 Haywards Heath residents, meaning, 9,300 people live in each square mile of Haywards Heath, it’s no wonder we appear to be bursting at the seams!

A square mile is enormous, so the numbers look correspondingly large. Most people reading this will know what an ‘acre’ is, but those younger readers who don’t, it is an imperial unit of measurement for land and it is approximately 63 meters square.

In Haywards Heath, only 13.35 people live in every acre of Haywards Heath, not as headline grabbing, but a lot closer to home and relative to everyday life, and if I am being honest, a figure that doesn’t seem that bad.

Yet, the issue at hand is, we need more homes building. In 2007, Tony Blair set a target that 240,000 homes a year needed to be built to keep up with the population growth, whilst the Tory’s new target since 2010 was a more modest 200,000 a year. However, since 2010, as a country, we have only been building between 140,000 and 150,000 houses a year. So where are we going to build these homes? It would seem we have no space! Or do we?

Well, let me tell you this fascinating piece of information I found out recently in an official Government report. Looking specifically at England (as it is the most densely populated country of the Union), all the 20 million English homes cover only 1.1% of its land mass. That is not a typo, only one point one per cent (1.1%) of land in England is covered by residential property. In more detail, of all the land in the Country -

·         Residential Houses and Flats 1.1%

·         Gardens 4.3%

·         Shops and Offices 0.7%

·         Highways (Roads and Paths) 2.3%

·         Railways 0.1%

·         Water (Rivers /Reservoirs) 2.6%

Industry, Military and other uses 1.4%

This leaves 88.5% as Open Countryside (and if you think about it add to that the gardens, which are green spaces, and the country is 92.8% greenspace).

As a country, we have plenty of space to build more homes for the younger generation and the five million more homes needed in the next 20 years would use only 0.25% of the country’s land. Now I am not advocating building massive housing estates and 20 storey concrete and glass behemoth apartment blocks next to local beauty spots such as Nymans Gardens or Wakehurst Place, but with some clever planning and joined up thinking, we really do need to think outside the box when it comes to how we are going to build and house our children and our children’s children in the coming 50 years in Haywards Heath.