Maidenhead’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 Maidenhead Property market came up in the conversation (as I am sure it does at many family parties in Maidenhead) 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 Maidenhead house building figures, in the
local authority area as a whole, only 490 properties were built in the last 12
months, split down into 440 privately built properties and 50 housing
association with not one council house being built. This is
simply not enough and the shortage of supply has meant Maidenhead property
values have continued to rise, meaning they are 10.8% higher than 12 months
ago, rising 0.5% 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 Maidenhead 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 Maidenhead homebuyers
and Maidenhead landlords alike). You see Maidenhead’s economy is quite varied,
meaning activity is expected to remain relatively strong into the early Summer
of 2016, despite recent introduction of the 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 Maidenhead was 439, whilst 6 months
ago, that figure was 544, whilst three and a half years ago it stood at 902… a
massive drop!
With demand for Maidenhead 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 Maidenhead.
