According to Government figures the number of new homes in England has risen by 15 per cent over the past year.
“These latest figures are clear evidence that this Government is turning things around, with over 1.1 million homes delivered since 2010. Steps have been made in the right direction, but I want to see a giant leap, and hundreds of thousands more homes. We owe it to our future generations to fix this broken housing market.” According to Communities Secretary Sajid Javid.
Whether you agree with him or not you cannot deny all political parties in the UK are for the expansion of house building. This is in stark contrast to their clampdown on the private rental sector where there seems to be no end to the potential pitfalls.
However small developers have been on the back burner for some time. Many having been decimated after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the reluctance of traditional lenders to lend on development. The tide is turning and there is massive opportunity for small developers to build a really secure property businesses by using development profits to lower the debt ratio in their rental portfolio.
The biggest obstacle at the moment is the apparent lack of land, although we address this in the RoadMap to Building a House, this will get easier in the years to come. In the housing white paper published in February 2017 councils were asked to prepare a local plan setting out how and where they expect to meet their residents’ needs for new homes. Action is now to be taken against 15 local authorities that have failed to produce a local plan.
Councils are also being encouraged to release land and there will be resistance to do this by some councils as there were to Thatcher’s plans to sell off Council Houses in the 1980. Make no mistake it will happen and you need to be ready for when it does. You do this by building a single house and then using the profits to increase the size of your developments so you are in a position to take advantage of the released land when it becomes available. A phrase uttered by Les Brown comes to mind “It’s better to be Prepared for an opportunity and not have one, than to have one and not be Prepared”
