Browsed by
Tag: house builders

Those house building numbers: Joy, reality then annoyance

Those house building numbers: Joy, reality then annoyance

The latest official housing figures provide a bit of a puzzle. The uplift in the actual figures doesn’t look that spectacular when you plot the graphs, so why is there so much fuss? The tale on the street is that house building is booming. Brick shortages, skills shortages, rising prices, it has to be a boom. And picked judiciously the figures are powerful. Private starts were up 29% in the third quarter compared with last year. Housing associations also started…

Read More Read More

Is income inequality screwing up the housing market? I’m curious

Is income inequality screwing up the housing market? I’m curious

For the past few years three questions have bugged me persistently. How could rising income inequality over the past thirty years not have affected the housing market? If it has had significant effects, what are they and how have these come about? Why is so little political and, it seems, academic attention paid to how income inequality might cause dysfunction within the housing market? This is in contrast to the more significant attention paid to how a dysfunctional housing system…

Read More Read More

Latest surveys suggest house price inflation is accelerating. That’s not a good thing

Latest surveys suggest house price inflation is accelerating. That’s not a good thing

The latest batch of statistics on the housing market have all been impressive, suggesting broad and strong growth in house sales and house prices. The RICS survey out today shows that over the past few months there has been a sustained increase in all the main indicators. A hefty majority of estate agents have seen increases in achieved prices, they expect further increases, they have seen rises in enquiries from new buyers and instructions from new sellers, and their level…

Read More Read More

Why brick data are still useful in tracking house building – if less so than in the past

Why brick data are still useful in tracking house building – if less so than in the past

The latest Building materials and components statistics were released by the business department BIS today. So I thought it worth having a wee peek at how facing brick deliveries have been going, given the general fuss about house building. I tweeted a few graphs earlier to show how brick deliveries had changed, which as I suggested provides a hint at changes in house-building activity. But it seems wise to add a few words of caution, since, as with all data,…

Read More Read More

What really drives planning applications?

What really drives planning applications?

They say: “If you don’t ask, you don’t get.” That’s certainly true for house builders and developers looking to gain planning permission. If they want to increase their supply of permissioned land on which to build houses they have to put in a residential planning application in the first place, which then may or may not be rejected. So with house building now back on the agenda in a big way we decided to use Barbour ABI data to examine…

Read More Read More

Searching for a Higgs Boson to explain the unsolved problems of the housing market

Searching for a Higgs Boson to explain the unsolved problems of the housing market

Over the past few months, particularly the past few days, I have bathed in data, ideas, business models, policies and blue sky thinking on how we can deliver more housing in the UK. This was the central theme running through yesterday’s Housing Market Intelligence conference. It was the broad thread that tied together the expert analyses in the associated Housing Market Intelligence report, which I edit. It was also the basic question that underpinned an Institute of Economic Development London…

Read More Read More

Are we ignoring one of the biggest construction opportunities out there?

Are we ignoring one of the biggest construction opportunities out there?

One of the greatest challenges for the nation is to repurpose its outmoded built environment to better match the needs of a vastly changed world. It needs to adapt offices and shops to fit with the Internet age. It needs to meet the environmental challenges. It needs to improve all forms of communication. And not last and definitely not least it needs to adapt and expand its stock of housing to meet massive demographic shifts. This is a topic that…

Read More Read More

Non-resi building sector could be hardest hit as house builders suck hard on the supply chain

Non-resi building sector could be hardest hit as house builders suck hard on the supply chain

The resurgence of house building has brought with it fears of a supply chain so stretched that we will see shortages appearing, production held back and costs rising. There’s almost certainly something in this. It seems to be common currency. As I’ve discussed before, there are emerging problems with the supply of bricks and labour. And EC Harris, for example, has picked up early signs that prices of materials associated with house building are rising faster than the average for…

Read More Read More

The official construction figures add to the growing case for cautious optimism

The official construction figures add to the growing case for cautious optimism

The latest construction output figures provide yet more reasons to suspect that the industry may be pulling itself out of its slough. This evidence is reinforced by the release of the newly-constituted new orders figures. The construction output data for July show the index of construction activity has risen to its highest level since last October. This measure, which is seasonally adjusted and deflated to account for price changes, stood in July at 95.5 against 100 in 2010. This may…

Read More Read More

Finding smiley faces in the wallpaper – a look at today’s house building data

Finding smiley faces in the wallpaper – a look at today’s house building data

What can be said of the latest (second quarter) house building statistics that we don’t already really know, or suspect we know? Probably not a lot. The chances are they tell us more about the things we are likely to forget or ignore. Let’s look at the statistics for house building in England. Starts were well up, a bumper 37% (not seasonally adjusted) comparing 2013Q2 with 2012Q2. But this is comparing a relatively event-free sun-baked quarter with a rain-sodden Jubilympics…

Read More Read More