Tag: housing market

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The cost-effective way to stabilise housing affordability across the whole of Britain

If you haven’t already signed the petition, please sign if you want necessary changes to stop the present house price crisis from continuing to crash the starter end of our housing markets.

Sadly none of the political parties in Westminster are addressing the housing price crisis properly. This is hurting the nation’s economy by becoming an inflationary drag on the whole of society.

The following three remedies are designed to correct the housing markets by enabling sufficient affordability to be restored and maintained, aimed particularly at those working locally.

Did you know that a substantial part of the price of a house today is based on the value of the land beneath it!

The first and (No1) proposal is to make any land which gains planning consent for residential use, should become rated as having a nil or a nominal land value. This would help bring house prices back to genuine affordability levels once more. This proposal is based on the valuation knowledge, reasoning, and experience of the petitioner. There are two further proposals in addition to this.

You may well ask, how have ‘I’ (one person or individual), come to know exactly what to do and which way to turn in order to resolve matters of this degree of specialisation? The answer is that I chose surveying and valuation as my career in my 20’s and commenced in a training job back in the 60’s, working amongst a team of qualified surveyors already knowing all of these things and taking five or so years to qualify by examination. As a newly qualified surveyor I could then put such knowledge into use, advising clients and employers throughout the rest of my career. As I’m now retired, I can give commentary to what I have come to know over my career. I am able to diagnose and cure the present housing crisis using my knowledge relating to land, buildings, law, planning, economics and valuation. Crucially, I understand how to use valuation knowledge as the essential tool required for resolving the present house pricing issues, which have becoming a significant problem across society these days. There are two further proposals to set out in addition to this.

To continue …
The second or (No2) proposal in this petition is to change The Town and Country Planning rules so that whilst the regional planning authorities should continue to administer the whole planning process as happens currently, all such decisions relating to residential land use would fall under the jurisdiction of the relevant Town or Parish Council and would be decided by that local Town or Parish Council with reference to the currently adopted Neighbourhood Development Plans (NDPs). These instruments will have been created in liaison with the regional planning authority as now of course.

Such devolution of planning decision procedures are required in addition to the current Government’s ‘New Wave of Devolution’, which essentially proposes to introduce regional Mayors if local planning authorities should decide to apply.

Demand and supply could easily be brought to balance within each individual town and village concerned by introducing an adopting Enhanced Neighbourhood Development Plans (ENDP). See ‘The house price affordability crisis’ on the web site for more information.

Balanced demand and supply locally could be achieved for each individual town and village by having an Enhanced Neighbourhood Development Plans (ENDP) fully adopted as being the document to refer to when making planning decisions throughout the validity of the ENDP.

The additional change under this petition is to devolve all such decisions relating to the residential use and development of land to the relevant Town or Parish Council to decide subject to and with reference to the currently adopted Neighbourhood Development Plans (NDPs), as explained.

Such extra devolution on residential planning decision-making would have to be included in the government’s current proposals for amendments to the existing National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), also part of the ‘New Wave of Devolution’.

Under this new devolution for residential planning applications there would no longer be a right-of-appeal to planning inspectors nominated by The Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) in the U.K. Instead, the local Town or Parish Council would be the authority to determine (to grant or refuse), all such planning applications within their jurisdiction.

If a dispute should arise following a decision made by the relevant local Town or Parish Council, any necessary appeal would be decided by a regulated arbitration process and there would be a formal hearing if deemed necessary. Under this procedure an appeal would be convened and heard locally upon application by the parties in dispute, instead of remotely by The Planning Inspectorate.

In other words, on the question of all applications for residential, or part residential planning approval, the local Town or Parish Council itself would expect to have a proper say, instead of only being allowed to make a formal comment to the regional authority, as occurs at present!

This way, appeals would be dealt with more quickly and appropriately, speeding up the whole planning process for residential planning applications. There would be a significant saving both in the time taken to determine these and in the financial cost of accomplishing the approved development.

The Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) in the U.K. should however retain the ultimate right to call a particular planning application in for determination at inception, but The Planning Inspectorate should no longer be involved in determining residential planning applications and appeals in general, because appeals against such decisions would have been fully devolved to the relevant local Town or Parish Council to decide locally.

To reassure petitioners on some of the technical aspects of this change and in brief, all land would still be owned freehold or leasehold but any change of residential user would be treated as development under the planning rules and such development of land would require planning permission as newly administered by the relevant Town or Parish Council. Therefore obtaining formal planning permission for a change of residential user would differ from that which currently happens under the existing planning rules.

The third or (No3) and final proposal, is to bring better pricing knowledge and advice in, making this available for all buyers and renters, by introducing new buyer-orientated property agencies.

To achieve this there should be a complete change of all the existing marketing methods for housing, by introducing property agents representing the buyer and renter side of the negotiating process in place of the existing seller-led estate agency system. This issue has been failing all housing markets around the whole of our country for a long time.

This proposal would be a considerable improvement for reducing the cost of housing and hinges on shortening the time it takes for sales and purchases to result in becoming successful completions. It would work by improving the way all residential property is marketed, whether going for sale or to let, by replacing the existing estate agent regime with a new and fully licensed buyer and renter orientated agency service called Residential Housing Agents (RHAs). 

These agents would act primarily on behalf of buyers and renters by advising them both upon the market value of the property under consideration and also the condition of such property. This way those purchasing or renting property, especially if it is for themselves and their families to live in, would be directly hiring and paying for the Residential Housing Agent, both to find the best property for them and to deal with the whole of the purchase (or the renting transaction), right through to completion. This would be completely different from (and a reverse of), the existing estate agency regime, bringing significant advantages to the market. Another of the distinctions would be that the sale of the family’s former residence may be dealt with by a different RHA from the one advising on the purchase (or the rental) of the house to be acquired but working on the common ground of obtaining a completion.

If these changes were brought in people moving between houses at the higher end of the market should not be out of pocket as a result, whereas those at the lower end would see considerably lower prices, helping them to climb onto the property-owning ladder in the first place. Lower rental values would also be a spin-off effect from this.

The overall cost of building new houses would also be noticeably reduced as a result of these three proposals.

Sales throughput of all forms of residential property would increase as the affordability levels themselves would simultaneously increase.

These are the very stimuli needed to get housing sales flourishing and get new house building completions increasing once again.

For more information on the necessary house marketing changes, go to:

The House Price Solution

How to Improve all local housing markets in England and Wales

Posted by: Peter Hendry, Housing Valuation Consultant

Author of:– The House Price Solution

Your comments on this subject would be appreciated.

Unless things change significantly and along the lines explained here, countless people will experience unnecessary pain and trauma so please sign our petition under the link:

The petition is on the following link:

Petition on the cost-effective way to stabilise housing affordability across the whole of Britain

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The Politics of Housing

The Politics of Housing is necessarily societal. In other words you can’t really divorce housing from politics.

When canvassing for the Brexit vote in 2019 and accepting becoming our Prime Minister in July 2019, Boris Johnson promised that his government would be a government inclusive for all in society; having won the popular vote on that basis.

Whatever political view individuals may take, it would appear that there are three institutions that should be held as being vital to the wellbeing of present day society. These are The Judiciary, The NHS and The Town and Country Planning Acts.

Whenever setting out to make new policy for the benefit of Britain’s populace, these three and established pillars of fairness should always be carefully considered.

Tough love, directed towards some parts of society, may well be necessary for its further improvement but it would, by its own definition, have to be based on love and nurture and not prejudice.

However even so, the noblest of such decisions, taken in the quest to improve the lot of society may occasionally fail, especially where housing matters are concerned.

What follows is a set of proposals specifically designed to resolve the present housing distribution problems.

FIRSTLY: Before designing a new Town & Country Planning system, ideally for the whole of Britain, it would be a very good idea to get a clear picture of what might make each local community thrive, and then incorporate precisely that into the new planning model.

To date we have seen little evidence of such an approach and practically no justification for the arbitrary zoning designations which are being proposed in the Planning White Paper currently being debated in Parliament. This does, therefore, deserve further and serious consideration.

In peacetime (i.e. whilst our country is not at war with another), residential planning consents should be delegated to all local town or parish councils for them to determine, depending upon local housing need.

This way, genuinely democratic decisions may be arrived at using local decision-makers whom are best able to understand what the current needs of the community are at any particular time.

The clear and over-riding objective must surely be for ordinary working people to be able to find openings for good new jobs close to where they may live.

This should mean the forward plan ought to involve a proper debate with business leaders to start searching for and employing more-skilled people, including training them up and paying them adequately whilst expecting more productivity/profitability from them in return.

Such an outcome and gain to industry could be achieved from increasing the incentive amongst school leavers and university graduates alike to decide on a higher-skilled career for themselves earlier, and then to train them more intensively for that.

Those youngsters who do not choose to follow this clear path would be likely to have to accept the unskilled jobs which there may be and at low wages (albeit with little or no prospects), of course.

This is, in effect, increasing the incentive for job seekers to decide what they would like to do earlier and to embark on getting the necessary training and qualifications which they will need for their choices of career.

Other successful economies have already achieved such outcomes and because this has been done elsewhere it could certainly be done in Britain, if the incentives were provided.

One organisation, KPMG (the accountancy conglomerate) is already in the news for helping in the battle for greater diversity among types of job, especially within the poorer communities, by offering apprenticeships. It wants nearly a third of their staff to be coming from working class backgrounds by 2030. Enabling diversity of perspective, fresh thinking, and, wide-ranging insight which should help all businesses to perform better.

People coming from routine maintenance and service organisations may apply. Levels of pay and prospects in life really matter to employees but so does aspiration. Van drivers, butchers and factory workers should be among those applying for schemes such as these if they should wish to do so.

What is Levelling Up really about?
Added to this post 2 jan 2022:

Levelling up is about empowering local leaders and communities.
It’s about raising living standards and growing the private sector.
It’s about spreading opportunity and improving our public services.
It’s also about boosting local pride and improving our local environments.

Young people should be empowered to learn all the skills they need in order to be enabled to use their passions and their abilities to help them get good jobs in the future, wherever they may choose to live.

All this is can now be achieved with the localised Towns Deals which are being made available by government as well as the Community Renewal Fund and other funds also to do with Levelling Up.

Under the present government you can search online for:
Department for Levelling up Housing and Communities

Equally important however is resolving the house price crisis itself!

To find out all about everything to do with the extreme lack of adequate and available housing on the market and how to deal with the non-affordability of it, click below.

This House Price Solution is devised to resolve the current housing crisis completely

You can either comment there, or go back to ‘The Politics of Housing’ and post your comment here.

What do you think about this idea for drastically improving the operation of all housing markets potentially across the whole of Britain?

Constructive comments are very much welcomed.

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The Cure For The Malady Across All British Housing Markets

The cure for the malady across all British housing markets is to use a combination of two cures, in a similar way to a doctor using two specific antibiotics to cure a bacterial infection.

The expertise required to achieve that would involve first acquiring an accurate knowledge of the causes of such infections and following this, the ability to diagnose the correct medicinal cure for the specific infection involved.

It is of course imperative to be able to understand precisely how and why a specific illness or malaise will have occurred. Only then can the correct medicinal cure be prescribed.

Peter Hendry says, “I can explain in simple terms why house prices are continuing to rise despite the increasing lack of affordability affecting ever more prospective buyers.”

In a nutshell, the housing market should find the values of houses in a quite specific way.

The true value (or the correct buy price), of any house being offered for sale should be arrived at by adding THREE separately-assessed components together:

1 The land value – which depends in part upon location.

2: The construction cost (including a profit element to the builder or developer).

3: A further amount of equity or profit produced as a result of having combined these two.

These are the things that a sensible buyer should theoretically be considering, even if only subliminally.

All too often however, anxious buyers will base their offers on a combination of how much they could possibly afford and borrow, together with knowing the asking price being quoted.

“What makes this task particularly difficult to quantify is that house prices in today’s housing marketplaces are not derived in perfect market conditions at all. The reason for this is because in a perfect marketplace, the whole amount of homes on the market would be sold and the demand for them would also be fully satisfied at all times.”

IF, housing markets around the whole country were near perfect, economically speaking, it wouldn’t take a year or more for each house-move to happen. Houses and flats going onto the market would take much less than a year to attract a buyer ready to complete on their purchase. 

There would then be fewer unsold and empty properties waiting to find buyers. Supply and demand would be in balance. House prices would enable this to happen and would facilitate sales to take place more swiftly than upwards of a year.

On the rental side of things, here markets are in a very different situation. There are far more people wanting to rent than there are rental properties available. Also, the supply of flats and houses is shrinking currently, which is forcing rent-levels to inflate. Demand for these properties seriously outstrips supply, economically speaking. Here, the obvious solution clearly has to be to provide more properties available for rent.

It should be noted however, if there were to be less unsold properties at any one time, there would be a lessening of demand for properties to rent, because more tenants would’ve become buyers! Therefore, improving buyers’ markets would clearly help with lessening the rental-demand side of things as well. That would be an important added bonus for both marketplaces, which is why ‘The House Price Solution’ is the final answer.

Instead, the present day housing markets have large overruns where, either there is too much property being offered at any one time or alternatively, there are too few properties being offered to purchasers.

Both extremes are most unsatisfactory for prospective purchasers of houses in the regional marketplaces and especially in tourist and second-home prevalent communities.

Unfortunately, current day estate agency does not assess house prices in the way described just now. Instead they peg asking prices at the level they might simply guess they could sell a house for but also they may well often include what their client (the seller) might hope to achieve when determining an asking price!

Worse, they base their asking prices on what other asking prices are, including what the other recent sales will have achieved, albeit these would have used skewed marketing comparisons themselves for the reasons just set out.

To justify what is being explained here, a year ago for example a typical estate agent had 37 properties available and 379 applicants on their register (according to statistics published by the NAEA). Today, after a spirited first half of the year and after COVID has started to reduce, a typical estate agent apparently has just 23 live listings and over 400 applicants on their register.

If knowledge such as this were to be broadcast, it would skew prices-levels downwards whilst the market is flush with houses for sale and it would skew prices-levels upwards when there were not enough houses coming onto the market – as now.

In the former case, sadly there is inherent pressure within estate agency to want to hide the true facts of an excess of properties being listed for sale compared with buyers so as not to spook the market and to keep things going as smoothly as possible, rather than face the reality of a downwards-changing market, with prices dipping.

In the latter case however, with too few properties on their books and too many buyers wanting them, broadcasting the lack of supply actually helps agents to justify trying for rising prices even against general economic trends! This has been what’s going on recently of course.

Selling agents may try to argue that it is the desperation of buyers which is forcing the prices up but that does not explain why the housing markets are operating at such low efficiency in terms of completed sales. This shows serious imperfections, resulting in their lack of stability which means these markets are in need of a completely new approach to buying and selling houses.

In my analysis and resultant diagnosis following understanding the true causes of these problems, two specific ways to deal with them emerge.

A: Firstly there should be restrictions on the right to occupy a proportion of houses in each locality as being permanent “Primary Residence” restricted. This would mean these houses would be for use only by local people, such as key workers for example.

Most people seem to agree that each locality absolutely needs housing to be affordable to those fulfilling the essential roles in their community. This should therefore be enshrined in each area’s local planning rules.

In peacetime (i.e. whilst our country is not at war with another), residential planning consents should be delegated to all local town or parish councils for them to determine, depending upon local housing need.

This way, genuinely democratic decisions may be arrived at using local decision-makers whom are best able to understand what the current needs of the community are at any particular time.

The different local housing markets could be brought to balance and price levels better able to reflect local demand for housing, more appropriately.

Secondly and very importantly:

B: The emphasis on all prices should be changed so that these are set by ‘buyer offers’ rather than seller price-rigging, which is of course not an open market practice in any way if this is carefully scrutinised.

This is where The House Price Solution (formerly described as The Hendry Solution) could come in. It allows for both of the essential changes cited above.

It would do this by re-shaping house sales methods entirely and by including the use of “Primary Residence” restrictions on certain properties.

AND

It would enable all buyers to be free to participate and establish the price levels themselves, (subject to declared “Primary Residence” restrictions, which would be locally established using the local planning rules).

For the full details of how to address all these issues simultaneously, please follow the link:

The House Price Solution

How to Improve all local housing markets in England and Wales

Posted by: Peter Hendry, Housing Valuation Consultant

Author of:– The House Price Solution otherwise known as The Hendry Solution.

What do you think about this idea for drastically improving the operation of all housing markets potentially across the whole of Britain?

Constructive comments are very much welcomed.

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Buyers need far better representation in the British housing markets

With estate agents acting primarily for sellers and land owners, buyers get poor advice or representation all too often.
Even though they are the ones raising (and usually borrowing) the money for each transaction, they are often the last ones to be told how things are progressing, especially where chains of other sales are involved. A lot of patching up of interlinking chains is frequently going on behind the scenes, which is not necessarily to the advantage of unsuspecting buyers further down the chain. Sale prices at the lower end may require to be re-evaluated.

This is inefficient and ought to be changed otherwise the different local housing markets across England and Wales cannot begin to function more like perfect marketplaces as they should do.

All this happens because estate agents are primarily motivated to try and obtain the best price they can for whatever asset it is they are selling, since they are contracted to act on behalf of the seller. The buyer is often the last person to be told when bids in competition with their own are are being negotiated by the selling agent and then the only remedy remaining for them is to have to find more cash to increase their offer!  It operates rather like a sort of clandestine bidding war usually conducted over a telephone.

House prices as a result, are now passing all time highs but also, they are increasing beyond average couples’ annual earning capabilities for maximum borrowing requirements. This is a big problem especially where earnings are falling. It’s vital that a more generally acceptable approach is available to everyone embarking on house moves, especially if they are first-time purchasers. Purchaser mobility ought to be what should be improved.

The only way this could be done would be to change the way residential property is sold by having agents acting for buyers instead of only acting for sellers.

It is clear that existing estate agents are understandably likely to be reluctant to consider such a change for as long as they can continue to control sales progress in the way they have done essentially since the 1920s.

It would require the buying public to start complaining about the anomalies they are having to contend with when using agents, as well as to prevail upon government to make the necessary improvements to bring about fairer but competitive pricing processes across all residential property markets. Only then could house prices track buyer purchasing power in the localities in which each particular property is located.
The correct solution to this problem does need further in-depth explanation in order for the concept to be fully understood.

What do you think about this idea for drastically improving the operation of all housing markets potentially across the whole of Britain?

Constructive comments are very much welcomed.

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Simply building more houses can’t solve the housing crisis

Obviously we need to get more houses built, both for rent and to buy but developing this as a strategy for calming the housing market is not going to remedy the prices uplift which we have recently experienced. It cannot do that simply because building more can’t achieve anything for as long as the considerable time it would take to actually complete the building of the extra housing required.

The market itself is in need of intervention and this does require the involvement of government. A government that can put effective policies into practice faster than the simple but over-quoted ‘build more’ idea.

My solution is to overhaul the way in which houses are marketed, both for sale and to let by changing the way agents themselves operate.

A more market friendly method is required so that house prices can be attuned more towards peoples ability to pay, with less of the speculative pricing by agents, whom currently act only for the vendor legally. It is this which requires urgent attention.

A more transparent housing market would not only take the froth out of asking prices but would have the added effect of calming rent levels too. For more information please go to the link below:

My proposal for the way housing in England and Wales should be marketed, is based on changing from vendor-centric estate agencies to buyer-oriented ones as described in The House Price Solution. This would not cost much to implement and would bring massive benefits to all local marketplaces.

What do you think about this idea for drastically improving the operation of all housing markets potentially across the whole of Britain?

Constructive comments are very much welcomed.