Construction industry forecasters are now expecting a drop in output next year of at least 5%. To put that fall in context, there have only been six worse years recorded since the data series began in 1955. And some might see the latest forecasts as potentially optimistic as they assume the Eurozone manages to muddle through its deepening crisis.
The various data suggesting how house prices shifted over 2011 are mostly in and the vast array of pundits have made their predictions for the market in 2012. So here’s a round up of the prospects for the housing market in the year ahead and a suggestion of what it might all mean for house building. If we look at all the indicators, the picture painted for 2011 was of house prices flatlining. Some indicators were up a little, some down…
Who’s been advising the Government on construction? The reason I ask is because if you want to get big bang for your buck in a time of recession in the short term what you do is invest in refurbishment projects and house building.
On the face of it the Homes and Communities Agency statistics for affordable housing starts are absolutely awful. I’m going to go out on a limb and accept that they look significantly worse as a snapshot of what is going on than the reality on the ground. The data suggest that the starts are back-end loaded within the financial year, so a drop in this half of the year would have been expected. Obviously this drop was greatly exaggerated by…
There’s little doubt that we need radical solutions to build more homes. There is a broad consensus for that view, leaving aside supporters of Malthus, the Daily Telegraph anti-house-building campaign and a few others. There’s little doubt also that the issues are complex and we need a strategy rather than one big idea to save the day. But unless I am very much mistaken the 88-page Laying the Foundations: A Housing Strategy for England probably doesn’t amount to a strategy…
Housing completions in England in the third quarter of this year at just 24,250 were the lowest in a generation or two at least. The Government can hide its shame a little by pointing to the seasonally adjusted figures which show completions in the final quarter of 2010 were lower. This still falls within the current Government’s time in office, but they have some room then to blame their predecessors. While a decline in the social sector might be expected,…
The balance of the news over the past couple of weeks suggests things are getting better rather than worse. But what does it all say about the medium-term prospects of the housing market? To recap. Today Persimmon released a broadly positive interim management statement with the tasty nugget of a 35% increase in first-time buyer visitors over a year ago. Bovis also released its statement today which said private reservations in the 44 weeks to November 4 were up 22%…
This is no ordinary recession. This is a serious depression, the end of which still looks to be at least a couple of years away and possibly a lot further. If that proves the case it would have lasted longer than the Great Depression of the 1930s, although the recession would not have been as quite as deep. The well respected economist and Financial Times commentator Martin Wolf recently wrote: “The UK is in the midst of what is set…
The latest set of residential property transactions figures from HMRC (the Revenue) make for rather gloomy reading. Without a perking up of sales in the final quarter the number of homes sold in 2011 is set be the lower than the slump in 2009. The seasonally adjusted HMRC data show that the number of homes worth more than £40,000 is continuing to slide. And, given the way things seem to work, that means we should not be surprised if fewer…
Prepare for a massive shift in housing standards over the coming decade. That’s what I see when I read the latest UK population estimates released today. In fairness this story line is much the same as when the 2008-based estimates were released, except these figures show a bigger population growth (at 67.2 million in 2020 that’s an extra 700,000) and we now expect far fewer homes to be built over the coming decade than we might have hoped for a couple…