Why are so many British homes empty?

AG47

Hundreds of thousands of homes across the UK are unoccupied, despite widespread concern about a housing shortage. Why would someone own a property and leave it vacant?
The Bezier building stands right in the middle of London's Old Street area, one of the most expensive and fashionable parts of the UK. Flats inside the apartment block can cost more than £1m and monthly rents of £2,000 are easily achievable.
But more than five years after its completion the Bezier, shaped like two sails full of wind - seemingly a metaphor for the area's forward-thinking economic confidence - is almost half-empty.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34930602

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

It's been a while since I looked but quite surprised at how quickly the number of empty homes has fallen.

The current stats are circa 600K empty houses, but of those, only 205K are empty long term (for more than 6 months).

The other roughly 400K are not long term empty, but part of the natural stock of houses being refurbished, in probate, awaiting sale/tenancy, in need of major repairs, etc, at any given time.

Back in 2007 the figures of a million empty houses (of which around half were empty for more than 6 months) were widely quoted.

The thing is, some empty stock is inevitable, people do refurbish houses, they do die and the house goes into probate, etc.

The article notes the huge housing shortage we currently have, 974K homes needed to be built between 2011 and 2014, but we only built 457K.

So I suppose it's not surprising the number of empty houses is falling, but it is remarkable that the figures have fallen quite so far and so quickly as they have.

kinger101

The article doesn't really provide much analysis. Many homes are empty because nobody wants to live there. Or the owner has moved into care and the property is too dilapidated to do anything with. Something needs to be done about the "blocks of bullion in the sky" as Boris Johnson calls them though. I thought councils now were able to charge higher tax on empty properties, but clearly, it's having little effect in Islington.

But thinking more widely about the problem of under-occupation, wouldn't you agree the BTL you hate is more effective in making efficient use of the space within properties. Owner-occupiers tend to have more empty rooms.

PasturesNew

In a rising market it's better to buy a shiny/new place and leave it empty, then resell as "brand new/unlived in" 4 years later, than to rent it out in those 4 years and refurbish it at the end as then it's "2nd hand" and some people simply don't want to pay a lot of money for something 2nd hand.

Also, without tenants renting it, you're not risking your "investment".

antrobus

AG47 wrote: »

Hundreds of thousands of homes across the UK are unoccupied, despite widespread concern about a housing shortage. Why would someone own a property and leave it vacant?
....

There are lots of reasons. But the primary reason would be that they are dead.

As it happens, the UK has very few empty homes. Spain has 3.4 million, France has 2.4 million, and even little Ireland has 400,000. Which, on a per capita basis, would be the equivalent of us having about 5.5 million empty homes. Since we only have 600,000 that just goes to show how trivial an issue it is.

Garethgrew

The numbers are not accurate, there are many empty properties that are officially occupied but the occupants live elsewhere.

antrobus

Garethgrew wrote: »

The numbers are not accurate, there are many empty properties that are officially occupied but the occupants live elsewhere.

They are called second homes for a reason.:)

westernpromise

kinger101 wrote: »

The article doesn't really provide much analysis. Many homes are empty because nobody wants to live there. Or the owner has moved into care and the property is too dilapidated to do anything with. Something needs to be done about the "blocks of bullion in the sky" as Boris Johnson calls them though. I thought councils now were able to charge higher tax on empty properties, but clearly, it's having little effect in Islington.

But thinking more widely about the problem of under-occupation, wouldn't you agree the BTL you hate is more effective in making efficient use of the space within properties. Owner-occupiers tend to have more empty rooms.

BTLers tend to be pro-building whereas OOs are almost always NIMBYs.