What’s the biggest street in Huddersfield (HD3)?

Well my recent articles about Huddersfield’s most moved street in the last 3 years and the Monopoly board article (the one where I listed the most valuable streets) caused quite a lot of interest locally, so I decided to see what else I could find out about the HD3 postcode area, and I have been able find out the biggest streets in the Huddersfield (HD3) postcode area.

Don’t worry, I will get back to some hard-hitting articles about the lack of new homes being built in Huddersfield, the trials and tribulations of being a Huddersfield buy-to-let landlord and the future of the Huddersfield property market .. yet in this article because of the previous positive comments, I wanted to give you what you, the Huddersfield homeowners and Huddersfield landlords asked about and wanted!

The biggest street in HD3, when it comes to the number of houses on it is New Hey Road, with 744 homes. In second place is Quarmby Road with 237 homes and in third is Longwood Road with 218 homes.

Not surprisingly. the most valuable street of the top 20 biggest streets is New Hey Road at £132.9m with an average value of £179,000 per property.

The street with the greatest number of movers in the last 3 years is also New Hey Road, yet its saleability rate was only 11.6%, with Blackthorn Drive having the highest saleability rate of 23.2%.

The full breakdown can be found in this chart below.

Street/Road	Number of Properties on the Street(s)	Total Value of Properties on the Street(s)	Average Value of Properties on the Street(s)	Number of Properties Sold on that street(s) in last 36 months	Saleability/Turn-over Rate in the last 3 years (# Houses divided by sales)
New Hey Road	744	£132,893,000	£179,000	86	11.6%
Quarmby Road	237	£30,546,000	£129,000	30	12.7%
Longwood Road	218	£23,483,000	£108,000	22	10.1%
Laund Road	211	£38,179,000	£181,000	28	13.3%
Longwood Gate	182	£25,136,000	£138,000	24	13.2%
Stoney Lane	162	£20,517,000	£127,000	12	7.4%
Scar Lane	160	£17,567,000	£110,000	20	12.5%
Blackthorn Drive	155	£32,412,000	£209,000	36	23.2%
Sycamore Avenue	145	£15,541,000	£107,000	5	3.4%
Goldington Avenue	144	£26,643,000	£185,000	11	7.6%
Crosland Road	141	£27,645,000	£196,000	14	9.9%
Halifax Road	141	£26,281,000	£186,000	19	13.5%
Wellington Street	139	£14,087,000	£101,000	22	15.8%
Prospect Road	136	£20,879,000	£154,000	26	19.1%
Chesil Bank	128	£12,717,000	£99,000	2	1.6%
Equilibrium	125	£16,690,000	£134,000	14	11.2%
Yew Tree Road	119	£23,139,000	£194,000	17	14.3%
Willwood Avenue	117	£11,362,000	£97,000	2	1.7%
Rufford Road	117	£12,225,000	£104,000	13	11.1%
Victory Avenue	117	£11,471,000	£98,000	6	5.1%

Note – if the same street name appears more than once in the postcode  - the number of houses has been amalgamated and averaged accordingly.

Yet, did you really think I wouldn’t get at all serious ..

The basic rudiments of the Huddersfield property market remain principally healthy in many parts of Huddersfield, yet the existing political environment means that the vital element of confidence has been diminished slightly in certain parts, and that is triggering a minority of potential property purchasers and house-sellers to vacillate, yet with unemployment at an all-time low, a record number of people with a job, ultra-low interest rates and decent mortgage availability (with the Banks and Building Societies tending to drop mortgage rates instead of increasing them), those Huddersfield first time buyers (and especially Huddersfield buy-to-let landlords) who have adjourned their next house purchase because of perceived political uncertainty should be reminded that talking to many of my fellow Huddersfield agents they have more homes on their books than at any time for the last three or four years, so there is a greater choice of Huddersfield properties to call your next home/BTL investment with a potential of securing a great property deal in the next month or so.

Irrespective of what happens with Brexit, Huddersfield people will still need a roof over their heads and as I have mentioned on a number of occasions, I have proved beyond doubt we aren’t building enough homes both locally in Huddersfield and nationally. If supply is limited and demand increases (as the population grows and we get older), prices in the medium to long term can only go in one direction. Upwards!

So, whatever happens with BoJo and Brexit – why wait, because once we get over that hurdle, there will just be another hurdle and another hurdle and by which time – we will be in 2029 and you would have missed the boat. We survived the Global Financial Crash, 3-day week in 1970s’, hyperinflation etc etc …  yet the choice is yours.

How Many Huddersfield Homeowners Have Paid Their Mortgage Off?

The Government’s Annual Housing Survey is 50 years old this year.  It has taken a snap shot of the UK’s property market every year since 1969 and in the recently published report for 2018, it wasn’t a surprise that owner occupation is still the most predominant tenure, yet now more people own their home without a mortgage rather than having a mortgage as the number people buying their first home (obviously with a mortgage) has declined since the Millennium.  The report also shows homeowners (mortgaged and owned outright) are, on average, older than renters and between the homeowners themselves, those who are mortgage free are older than those with a mortgage.

Looking at the most recent of data for Kirklees, I wanted to see how we compared to the national picture. Therefore, focusing on the main 4 tenures of owned outright, owned with a mortgage, social housing (i.e. Council Housing and Housing Association) and private rented, this is what I found out...

Kirklees - Tenure by Age
Age	Owned Outright	Owned with Mortgage	Social Housing	Private Rented
Age 24 & Under	3.7%	10.2%	25.8%	60.3%
Age 25 to 34	6.0%	43.3%	15.0%	35.7%
Age 35 to 49	12.1%	57.4%	13.1%	17.4%
Age 50 to 64	40.3%	36.7%	13.2%	9.7%
Age 65 to 74	67.9%	8.3%	17.0%	6.9%
Age 75 +	67.2%	4.1%	20.2%	8.5%

Looking at the stats, you can see that homeownership in Huddersfield and council area as a whole (both owned and owned with a mortgage combined) is lower in the 25yo to 34yo age range compared to 35yo to 49yo, yet roll the clock back to the 1980s and opposite was the case.

So how many local homeowners have paid off their mortgage?

47.5% of Huddersfield and Kirklees homeowners are mortgage free, yet of the 35,672 households that are owned by 50yo to 64yo in Huddersfield and the Kirklees area, 47.7% of those people still have a mortgage.

As most people bought their first house in their early to mid 20’s back in the 1980’s, this shows that a lot of Huddersfield and Kirklees people must have re-mortgaged in the past and extended their borrowings (otherwise they should have paid their mortgage off now).

The other thing that concerns me is the 4.1% of the Huddersfield and Kirklees over 75yo homeowners that have a mortgage.

If you amalgamate the national historic ranges going back to 1977 (see the graph below “UK Households with a Mortgage by Age – 1977 to 2018” and note the age bands are slightly different to the recent local stats because they were carried out under different government departments), you will see the number of people who own a property with a mortgage has been dropping since the Millennium, yet nationally the number of people who own a property has remained roughly the same, even with the growth of the private rented sector.

Reports in the industry suggest that in the next ten years that will increase, as nearly 1 in 5 homeowners will be still paying off their mortgage after retirement. One of the reasons behind that will be the legacy of interest-only loans and delayed first-time buying as we become more and more like Germany in our house ownership models, where people naturally rent their homes until their 50’s and then buy when they inherit money from their parents.

In the meantime, demand for Huddersfield rental properties will only increase … so good news for Huddersfield Buy to Let landlords and indirectly Huddersfield homeowners as well.

Huddersfield Property Market Update Summer 2019

The foundations of the Huddersfield Property Market over the summer have continued to be principally sound; yet the existing political macroclimate means that the critical element of consumer confidence has been reduced and that is triggering some potential Huddersfield property buyers and Huddersfield house sellers to falter slightly and hang fire making any firm decisions on property.

With record low interest rates at 0.75%, low unemployment rates of 3.8%, and decent mortgage availability (even those with low deposits - there were 224 mortgage deals available on the day of writing this article where only a 5% deposit was required and 5 main stream lenders that would offer 100% no deposit mortgages), Huddersfield buyers have a lot going in their favour, aside from the perceived political uncertainty. 

Interestingly, Rightmove have stated there are more properties for sale today in the Country, than at any time since 2016, and Huddersfield follows that trend. Even with that in mind, property values have remained reasonably stable as The Land Registry has just released its House Price Index for Huddersfield and the surrounding locality and it makes very interesting reading.

Overall, property values in the Huddersfield area are 0.2% higher

than a year ago as the average property value in Huddersfield now stands at £184,800.

When I looked at the types of Huddersfield properties, a slightly different picture appeared..

·         Huddersfield Detached homes rose by 0.6%

·         Huddersfield Semi-detached homes rose by 0.9%

·         Huddersfield Terraced/Town-House dropped by 0.3%

·         Huddersfield Flats/Apartments dropped by 1.7%

and splitting down the types of Huddersfield into property types ..

·         Huddersfield Detached £308,600

·         Huddersfield Semi-Detached £175,900

·         Huddersfield Terraced/Town-House £124,000

·         Huddersfield Flats/Apartments £133,100

Yet, Huddersfield Property Market Blog readers will know I always like to measure the health of the Huddersfield property market not only by house prices but transaction levels as well ..

2,471 properties were sold in the last year in Huddersfield,

 higher than the 10-year average of 2,418 properties per annum

Considering the uncertainty the Country has been through in the last three years with the ‘B’ word issue, I don’t think that’s too bad and shows the underlying resilience of the Huddersfield property market.

Now looking forward towards the end of the year .. how will Huddersfield house values change under the new Prime Minister?

Huddersfield buy-to-let landlords and Huddersfield first-time buyers seem to be sustaining their preceding activity levels, which is heartening news. It’s quite conceivable that both cohorts are presently profiting from the marginally increased numbers of Huddersfield homes on the market, which not only offers them greater choice, but aids with their negotiations. The suggested Stamp Duty changes made me look at previous Stamp Duty changes in the last decade and their effects have been rather short term.

That means those selling their homes in Huddersfield need to be realistic with their pricing, and, as most sellers also buy a property, what you might lose on your sale you will make up on the purchase. 

BoJo, Brexit … to be honest are all short-term distractions from the long-term issues of the UK and Huddersfield property market. Until we start building at least 300,000 properties a year to meet the demand for UK property, demand will always outstrip supply, meaning irrespective of short-term fluctuations that may (or may not) be caused by domestic and world events (including the ‘B’ word’), prices will always in the medium to long term remain stable and increase.

Is Huddersfield Too Densely Populated?

Has England’s green and pleasant land all of a sudden become England’s green and overcrowded land?

With the nation’s ever-increasing population and the double whammy that people are now living longer, this means as each year goes by, there is an ever-growing strain on public services and in particular my favourite topic - housing. It’s no wonder some people are saying things are at crisis point when it comes to infrastructure (like roads, schooling etc) and in particular housing.  I hear it all the time, people complaining that Huddersfield looks like a building site and, we are packing people in like sardines into our Huddersfield homes. Yet I wanted to find out exactly what the truth was.

Starting with the UK as a whole, there 698 people per square mile whilst in England, there are 1,103 people per square and finally in Greater London 14,587 people per square mile  … these all sound quite awful numbers, until you drill down and realise a square mile is an awfully big area - there are only 93,600 square miles in the whole of the UK and that includes the wilderness areas of Scotland!

Let’s look at more realistic areas of land ... and I want to look at my favourite - the acre. To those born after the mid 1970’s, an acre is roughly half the size of a football pitch or a square roughly 63 metres by 63 metres and there are just less than 2.5 acres in a hectare.

The population of Huddersfield is 22,962 (HD1) and the total area is 1,539 acres, meaning 14.92 people live per acre in Huddersfield (HD1)

So, how does that compare to neighbouring areas and towns...

Location and Postcode	Population	Area in Acres	Population Density - # People per Acre
Huddersfield (HD1)	22,962	1,539	14.92
Halifax (HX1)	24,131	1,128	21.39
Bradford (BD7)	35,345	1,620	21.82
Rochdale (OL11)	45,812	4,370	10.48
Leeds (LS16)	36,457	8,163	4.47

As you can see, only just under 15 people live per acre in Huddersfield (HD1), interesting when compared to both Greater London, which has density of 23.26 people per acre and London’s most crowded suburb, Pimlico at 92.32 people per acre. Yet even Pimlico is nothing to the Collblanc district in Barcelona, which has 214.8 people living it per acre.

So, is Huddersfield over populated? Yes, it seems that way at school time or rush hour when sitting in traffic that Huddersfield is over populated – yet the stats show - we aren’t.

Evidently, we are never going to have an even spread of population as can be seen from the figures in the table, and the remote nature of some parts of the Country would not be able to withstand high densities of new people without enormous infrastructure investment.

Yet could we accommodate a much larger population in the UK (and Huddersfield) although there would be trade-offs? Look back at the 17^th and 18^th century and certain sectors of society were warning about population growth. The population of the UK in 1801 was 10.5 million and even with the growth of the population since then, only 1.2% of the UK is currently built on for housing purposes.

The question, it seems to me, is not can we manage but how

would a larger Huddersfield population change our way of life,

both for better and possibly worse?

The planners have a responsibility to ensure Huddersfield provides its fair share of new homes to accommodate this population growth in the coming years. The local authority has a responsibility towards adequate provision of the infrastructure of roads, hospitals and schools etc., to match the growth in housing. This is not a political topic and I hope once the ‘B’ word is finally sorted we can get on with addressing the shortage of affordable new homes for future generations.

Huddersfield Homeowners can now build larger extensions without planning permission

The need for more homes has always been one of the biggest issues with regard to the Country’s housing crisis.  One of the main reasons for families wanting to move home is the need for more accommodation as their families grow and so in 2013 and 2015, the planning permission rules were relaxed to try an alleviate this issue.

Initially in 2013, Nick Clegg, as Deputy Prime Mister, brought in temporary planning rules to allow larger single storey rear extensions without the requirement of a full planning application.  The temporary rules allowed terraced and semi-detached homes to be extended by just over 19ft, whilst detached houses were able to add even bigger extensions of up to 24ft.  Since those rules were relaxed six years ago, 109,320 people have taken advantage of the temporary rules (aka “permitted development size guidelines”).

Homeowners wanting to extend within these permitted development guidelines, must still inform the local authority of the extension beforehand, and local authority officials still need to then notify the neighbours.  If the neighbours object, the local authority could still stop the extension being built, but only if it is likely to damage the character or enjoyment of the neighbourhood.  The planning process exists for a reason and whilst these relaxed planning rules are popular with property owners, it does mean local authorities have little chance to deliberate the impact of these extensions on their locality.  However, 22,779 permitted developments had been refused in the same time frame meaning, 17.2% of permitted development planning applications have been refused since 2013.

Now these temporary rules have been made permanent recently as the Government believe these measures will help households extend their properties without fighting through the time-consuming red tape of obtaining planning permission.  The government believes this is part of a package of planning reforms to build more households, build them better, quicker and make the housing market work, meaning families can grow without being forced to sell and move… or does it?

The average size of a property

in Huddersfield is 938 sq.ft

.. internally (1,074 sq.ft  externally), whilst to the national average 929 sq.ft internally (1,081 sq.ft externally).  Interesting when compared to the average size of a new homes built nationally which is 12.1% lower at 818 sq.ft internally (927 sq.ft externally).

These relaxed rules are only for single-storey extensions though, when most growing families don’t need an extra downstairs reception room, they need an additional upstairs bedroom.  This means if families do want an extra bedroom upstairs, they will still have to go through the rigmarole of submitting a full planning permission.  Although, many Huddersfield people have used these rules in the last 6 years to build a decent size granny-annex – there are other options less explored out there.

There was a second (less advertised) temporary change the Government made to planning rules in 2015, that has also been made permanent recently, many may have missed it, yet it has a bigger potential impact on the housing market.  The new rules make permanent the removal of planning rules to allow office blocks and shops to be converted into residential homes without a full planning application being made.  Since 2013, 11,090 office blocks and 1,750 shops have been converted into residential households.  This doesn’t sound a lot, but in 2017 alone, converted shops and office blocks provided 37,000 new households alone in the Country (or 17% of the new household created in 2017).

Over the next decade, more and more office blocks and shops will be converted into residential properties … and this will slowly change the dynamic of the housing market and the high street … and I’m not sure whether that will be for the good or bad ... only time will tell?