8.7% rise in Crawley Property
Values adds weight to the town’s Housing Crisis
Crawley’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. My parents moved to Crawley in the 70’s and the
other day at a family get together; the subject of the Crawley Property market
came up in the conversation (as I am sure it does at many family parties in Crawley)
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, 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 (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 Crawley house building figures, in the local authority area as a whole,
only 160 properties were built in the last 12 months, split down into 110
privately built properties and 50 housing association with not one council
house being built. This
is simply not enough and the shortage of supply has meant Crawley property
values have continued to rise, meaning they are 8.7% higher than 12 months ago,
rising 1.0% in the last month alone.
I was
taught at school (all those years ago!), that’s it’s all about supply and
demand, this economics game. The demand for Crawley 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 Crawley homebuyers and Crawley landlords alike). You
see Crawley’s economy is quite
varied, meaning activity is expected to remain relatively strong into the early
Summer of 2016, especially as some Crawley buy to let landlords try to complete
purchases ahead of the introduction of new stamp duty rules in April.
.. and 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 last month
in Crawley was 337, whilst three years ago, that figure was 458 whilst five
years ago it stood at 946… a massive drop!
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