Right to buy to be extended

CLAPTON

westernpromise wrote: »

I don't know where specifically, because I'm not in the market, but my calculation is as follows. If you look at this data

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/305680/Table_563_-_Discontinued.xls

...you can see that in 2010, the average price of a hectare of residential building land in London was about 6.5 million quid. I haven't found a reference for what it is now, but let's say it's 8 million a hectare.

The average UK house is much less than a hectare - only about 76 square metres in fact.
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14916580)

Let's double it to allow for a garden (or space to park 4 or 5 cars), and call it 150 square metres. 150 square metres are 0.015 of a hectare.

So your land would cost 0.015 x £8 million = £120,000.

So a plot big enough for 4 flats could certainly be had for the kind of money I'm suggesting in London.

You then build something like the converted houses in Maida Vale or Notting Hill, where you've got four floors, one flat per floor. You get four onto one plot, and as long as you can build them for less than £875k, you get back four extra homes for every four you've sold.

Where there were four rented homes, there are now four owner-occupied homes plus four new homes, making eight.

that makes interesting reading although I'm not sure how to interpret the results
In London there isn't really 'building ' land as such , there is mainly brown fill site that get redeveloped so I'm not entirely sure what the land value means


However, the logic is fine: if assets are sold by the HA at a price that clears any debt on them plus leaving a profit, then that can be put to build more properties.
Although i don't like the subsidy on the lucky winners, they already have a ongoing subsidy and in the end we have more properties and maybe fewer social houses which is a good thing.

westernpromise

CLAPTON wrote: »

that makes interesting reading although I'm not sure how to interpret the results
In London there isn't really 'building ' land as such , there is mainly brown fill site that get redeveloped so I'm not entirely sure what the land value means


However, the logic is fine: if assets are sold by the HA at a price that clears any debt on them plus leaving a profit, then that can be put to build more properties.
Although i don't like the subsidy on the lucky winners, they already have a ongoing subsidy and in the end we have more properties and maybe fewer social houses which is a good thing.

I'm more or less in the same place I think - a rising population and a static supply of houses appears unsustainable. So therefore I'd rather do something that creates random winners and not-winners but addresses a problem, than do nothing just so as not to create those random winners.

The issue of housing shortage seems to me to be intractable while we are in the EU with free movement of people and while the EU's economy is in trouble. Therefore things like this are probably needed.

It will be interesting to see whether building more homes does increase owner-occupation because a lot of euro immigrants come from countries where there isn't the preoccupation with homeowning.

We could end up in a place where if you want to rent you can, and if you want to buy you can. A bit like 1997, in fact.

cells

westernpromise wrote: »

I don't know where specifically, because I'm not in the market, but my calculation is as follows. If you look at this data

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/305680/Table_563_-_Discontinued.xls

...you can see that in 2010, the average price of a hectare of residential building land in London was about 6.5 million quid. I haven't found a reference for what it is now, but let's say it's 8 million a hectare.

The average UK house is much less than a hectare - only about 76 square metres in fact.
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14916580)

Let's double it to allow for a garden (or space to park 4 or 5 cars), and call it 150 square metres. 150 square metres are 0.015 of a hectare.

So your land would cost 0.015 x £8 million = £120,000.

So a plot big enough for 4 flats could certainly be had for the kind of money I'm suggesting in London.

You then build something like the converted houses in Maida Vale or Notting Hill, where you've got four floors, one flat per floor. You get four onto one plot, and as long as you can build them for less than £875k, you get back four extra homes for every four you've sold.

Where there were four rented homes, there are now four owner-occupied homes plus four new homes, making eight.

london is a big place and prices vary quite a lot

also its not really priced on hectors but in approvals

if you have a 1 acre site for 100 flats that will fetch a dam lot more than a 2 acre site for 20 homes

cells

westernpromise wrote: »

I'm more or less in the same place I think - a rising population and a static supply of houses appears unsustainable. So therefore I'd rather do something that creates random winners and not-winners but addresses a problem, than do nothing just so as not to create those random winners.

The issue of housing shortage seems to me to be intractable while we are in the EU with free movement of people and while the EU's economy is in trouble. Therefore things like this are probably needed.

It will be interesting to see whether building more homes does increase owner-occupation because a lot of euro immigrants come from countries where there isn't the preoccupation with homeowning.

We could end up in a place where if you want to rent you can, and if you want to buy you can. A bit like 1997, in fact.

france manages to build 3 x as many homes as we do

we managed to build in the past 3x as much as we do now

immigration is not to blame

fekin councils are


also there is little to no correlation with density and supply. eg over the last decade hackney has built quite a lpt of homes per capita even though its the 3rd most dense borough in london

westernpromise

cells wrote: »

london is a big place and prices vary quite a lot

also its not really priced on hectors but in approvals

if you have a 1 acre site for 100 flats that will fetch a dam lot more than a 2 acre site for 20 homes

That's why I used the average price. If you have better stats I'd be interested in them, as someone's personal incredulity is not a persuasive argument.

The fact is though that even my estimate of 150 square metres as a plot size is very generous. A typical 3-bed home is indeed 76 square metres - but that's on two floors, so its footprint is actually 38. In suggesting a plot size 4 times larger, I am leaving room for quite a bit of garden and off-street parking, or for quite a lot of these HA-sale-funded homes to be houses rather than flats.

It's doable all right. The issue is seeing that it gets done. It's pretty clear that a lot of vested interests in things like housing associations viscerally oppose the principle of poor people getting a home of their own, for really quite discreditable reasons.

Castle

According to this the average 3 bedroom is around 88sqm
http://www.architecture.com/files/ribaholdings/policyandinternationalrelations/homewise/caseforspace-executivesummary.pdf

So you would actually have to make the building 8 stories high in order to accommodate 4-3 bedroom flats within your 38sqm footprint.

More likely, any development would probably be mixture of one, two and three bedrooms. The other big problem with an one hectare site would be road access to the other properties.

cells

westernpromise wrote: »

That's why I used the average price. If you have better stats I'd be interested in them, as someone's personal incredulity is not a persuasive argument.

The fact is though that even my estimate of 150 square metres as a plot size is very generous. A typical 3-bed home is indeed 76 square metres - but that's on two floors, so its footprint is actually 38. In suggesting a plot size 4 times larger, I am leaving room for quite a bit of garden and off-street parking, or for quite a lot of these HA-sale-funded homes to be houses rather than flats.

It's doable all right. The issue is seeing that it gets done. It's pretty clear that a lot of vested interests in things like housing associations viscerally oppose the principle of poor people getting a home of their own, for really quite discreditable reasons.

i am not sure what it is you are trying to figure out but your own link shows 2007 land prices at >£10m and they must be at least double that now for london, your choice of 2010 at the height of the meltdown when nobody could buy/borrow-to-buy as a base probably leads to a wrong conclusion

as for density of developments the London plan suggests

400-850 habitable rooms per hector for Zone 1
250-500 habitable rooms per hector for zone 2
200-350 habitable rooms per hector for Zone 3
120-350 habitable rooms per hector for Zone 4

I think "habitable rooms" is effectively the number of bedrooms plus 1 for the living room

So for Z3 it works out to something like 50-125 x 3bed-flats/houses-per-hector


So if you say £20m / 100 x 3-bed-flats/houses you get ~£200k cost per plot



Of course there are sometimes much higher density developments, in Westminster council some developments are as high as 1100 habitable rooms per hector but I suspect those are both high rise flats AND make use of existing roads/sites quite a lot so flatter the number

cells

Nearly 10 years old now but this gives an idea, seem density of new builds has been increasing each year

TickersPlaysPop

All this discussion about London.... 2 problems with threads about 'London'

1) so often people do not specify central, or greater or what part
2) London is very extreme in itself and also compared to the whole country

It is criminal that successive governments have not flagged house price inflation as a topic for debate and a priority issue for the country over the past 20 yrs.

Horse has bolted, sorry you failed....

We need a new political system, a new financial system, new tax system, new relationship with Europe.... if we have no control over immigration.... we need a rebate to invest in infrastructure to cope with the extra people... being the employment capital of Europe and providing that service should not be free.

The demand for houses is due to changing demographics and life styles and also immigration.

Loughton_Monkey

Graham_Devon wrote: »

....Nurses, policemen etc are not paid huge salaries. Often single parents too.......

A very intriguing analysis of these 'front end' paragons of public service.....

Please advise what it is about these good people you are trying to imply. That they are more promiscuous? Or that somehow they divorce more than any other professions?