What Are Stalled Housing Sites & How Do They Affect Prices?

Just when it felt to estate agents as if the housing market no longer had any more surprises, the summer of 2024 once again ignited demand through plans to radically increase the supply of houses across the country.

A radical plan to build 1.5m houses over the next five years has inflamed debate about how this will be implemented, what types of houses will be built and how it will affect property prices in various markets.

One particular target of the plan revealed in late August 2024 was to speed up the implementation of “stalled housing sites”, which a Government press release claims could lead to the construction of as many as 300,000 new homes, enough to meet a fifth of the overall target.

The definition of a stalled housing site is any development project where planning permission has been granted but work has not yet started on the sites.

These projects can be blocked for a variety of reasons, from issues with investment, a need to undertake detailed surveys, changes in contractors for various reasons, or simple issues with delays in responses from either the planning department in charge or the developers.

As many buyers who attempted to buy any property during the bull run of the early 2020s can attest, conveyancing and other similar bureaucratic processes are often significantly delayed due to the accumulation of many smaller delays.

A late form here and a late permit there and a housing development project can end up months or even years behind schedule as it ends up trapped in regulatory, investment and legal limbo.

The goal of the New Homes Accelerator is apparently to identify where the issues and bottlenecks are and find solutions that allow the homes to be delivered as quickly as possible to a desired and expected standard.

If it works, it should provide a new supply of affordable housing to regions that had been promised new developments but had faced months or years of broken promises on that front.

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