Huddersfield’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 Huddersfield Property market came up in the conversation (as I am sure it
does at many family parties in Huddersfield) 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
Huddersfield house building figures, in the local authority area as a whole,
only 360 properties were built in the last 12 months, split down into 340
privately built properties and 20 housing association with not one council
house being built. This
is simply not enough and the shortage of supply has meant Huddersfield property
values have continued to rise, meaning they are 3.2% higher than 12 months ago,
rising 0.2% 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 Huddersfield 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 Huddersfield homebuyers and Huddersfield landlords
alike). You see Huddersfield’s economy
is quite varied, meaning activity is expected to remain relatively strong into
the early Summer of 2016, especially as some Huddersfield 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 Huddersfield was 680, whilst 2 years ago, that figure was 872 whilst four
years ago it stood at 1,311… a massive drop!
With demand
for Huddersfield property rising, minimal new homes being built and less
properties coming onto the market, that can only mean one thing ... now is a
good time to be a homeowner or landlord in Huddersfield. For
more articles like this, please visit the Huddersfield Property Market Blog http://huddersfieldproperty.blogspot.co.uk/
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