with
insite
Whathouse.co.uk, KEITH OSBORNE
very year I say it: it’s all over so quickly. And with the echoes of New Year’s Eve fireworks in the capital still ringing in the ears (and the
banana confetti stuck in the back of the throat), there’s already a great deal to talk about in the new homes industry.
Help to Buy continues to grab the headlines. The great news for Wales is the launch of the scheme there, which should begin to bring about a positive change to the market in that beleaguered region. It’s certain to be welcomed by housebuilders and homebuyers alike, who’ve seen how it has boosted the industry in England over the past 10 months. When I spoke recently to Glyn Mabey, regional managing director for Persimmon in East and West Wales, he was delighted to finally be able to offer the scheme at his developments. The company is the busiest housebuilder in Wales, having constructed some 900 homes there in 2013 and Mabey hopes to reach four figures if demand in Wales rises in the same way as it did in England after Help to Buy was launched last April. Persimmon had already taken its own steps to assist buyers in the Welsh market with its cannily
The first two editions of the WhatHouse? regional newspapers
A flying start E
New announcements are keeping housebuilding at the top of the news agenda, says editor of
named Help You Buy scheme, prompted by “sheer frustration” according to Mabey. Having already seen NewBuy Cymru fail to launch, the company decided to create a scheme in the image of Help to Buy in order to “make a point”. With 130 buyers benefitting from that proprietary scheme in a relatively short time, it would seem that that point was made very effectively. We’ll only really be able to monitor the success of Help to Buy in Wales when we see the stats come through on the LSL New Homes Index in due course.
David Cameron has made an early new year announcement on Help to Buy in England with
Help to Buy Wales launched on 2 January
the news that nearly £1bn of lending has been created by the mortgage guarantee element of the scheme launched in October. This figure represents 750 completed sales and a further 6,000 applications and comes on top of 20,000 buyers who have taken up the equity share option of Help to Buy.
While welcoming the news, shadow housing minister Emma Reynolds commented that “rising demand for housing must be matched with rising supply if this scheme is to bring the cost of housing within the reach of low- and middle- income earners”. There’s barely a housebuilder in the country who hasn’t already brought this point up ad nauseum and it remains to be seen whether changes already announced to planning policy will lead to a quicker and less fraught process or whether the supply side of the housing equation will continue to be hamstrung by spurious demands and needlessly complex and inconsistent regulation. Vince Cable has suggested a “reassessment” of Help to Buy in London and the south-east, though the government figures released with Cameron’s comments state that around three-quarters of the mortgage applications under the scheme have come from outside London. Furthermore, with more than 80% of applications coming from first-time buyers and the average property price purchased under the scheme at about £160,000, far lower than the national average property price, it looks as if Help to Buy really is helping those who most need the assistance.
On to more parochial matters: you may now be in possession of a copy of one of our new What House? newspapers. We managed to head-hunt a team of elves in the run-up to Christmas to mail out several hundred copies from Globespan Towers while Royal Mail were delivering two editions to around 200,000 ABC1 homes across the south and south-east of England. If you didn’t receive a copy and would like us to send you one so you can see what we’re up to, please give us a call on 020 7940 1070. Following the delivery of these first editions we were pleased to note a six-fold increase in visits to the
Whathouse.co.uk home page in the final week of December compared with the start of the month and to the same period in 2012. This is natural traffic and suggests that there was a significant brand awareness effect from distributing the newspapers at that time. From this month, we increase output to four different editions and around half a million recipients, adding the West Midlands and eastern England regions to the mix.
sh showhouse January 2014 | 15
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