rising house prices – Improve all U.K. housing markets locally

14 November, 202412 December, 2024

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

Building thousands of new houses arbitrarily, without consulting local communities to find out what is most needed and where these should be built would be a derogation of duty when done without due regard to all existing locally drawn up Neighbourhood Development Plans (NDPs), as originally promised by the newly elected Labour government. Enhanced NDPs should also be commissioned, before good taxpayers money is spent and wasted on new housing. Simply building high numbers of new houses cannot solve the current housing crisis because the pricing issue is a market failure problem rather than a supply one. I would happily explain why that is to anyone interested.

If you haven’t already done so please sign the petition link at the bottom of this page if you want 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.

So, here on this web site is the full reasoning explaining what is needed to finally improve all the housing markets across the whole of Britain? If you follow the link below you will find yourself on that very page. Please enjoy this offering and by all means comment if you have thoughts of your own about this.

This site proposes changes to the whole way in which houses are marketed by agents as well as bringing in far more effective planning controls.

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

The House Price Solution

“Introducing The House Price Solution”

Posted by: Peter Hendry, Consulting Valuation Surveyor
Author of:– The House Price Solution

Please sign our petition.
It is about squaring the price levels of housing depending upon the respective level of wealth of purchasers and their ability to afford such property. Unless things change significantly along these lines, countless people will continue to experience considerable financial anxiety and suffering in the process.
The link below opens the petition in a new tab for you to look at.

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

Your action in asking our government to debate this could help bring about all of these much needed changes.

31 July, 20211 December, 2024

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).