Chaps
Sitting behind a pc complaining about the price of housing is dead easy, any moron can do it. What we need is sensible answers and not one person in this thread has even remotely approached that.
Building companies have never built affordable housing because no one buys them. If they were sellable, they would be built by the thousands. No builder will build a house that no one buys.
....
The moment you build the right amount of houses, the prices will fall.
Agreed on the solution Mick, and I didn't mean to whinge - however it does annoy me when people who have houses moan at those you can't. Walk a mile in the other person's shoes and all that.
However I would contend that the problems are not that no one will buy an affordable home, it's just that developers are lazy and greedy so are incapable of building houses that are affordable.
First, they are allowed to value the land at whatever they can get away with, typically they sit on land until the price is right to make the required profit. If you were not allowed to make a profit on the land for affordable housing then this may combat that side of things.
From my experience builders are grossly inefficient. They probably spend at least 50% more than necessary in some cases due to incompetence. Project managed and manufactured in the right way my house should cost less that £80k to build, its around 1100 square feet, three stories with 4 beds.
I know that my developer struggled to turn a profit on our phase of the development, however they had to:
Rebuild our back fence three times;
Repaint our front door twice;
Replace a newl post;
Re-fix and paint the entire first floor dot n dab on one wall;
Re-turf our lawn;
Re-lay the entire downstairs vinyl;
and probably more that I have forgotten.
They had to re-lay the pavements in our close because the council rejected the first lot, and I think they've also had to completely re-turf the play park as it still isn't open, so my guess is that the council rejected it the first time round.
The most comical/frustrating sage involved the flooding of our back garden. Water was springing up from next door and cascading over our retaining wall - it was a water feature that Chelsea Flower Show would give an award too!
After over a year of faffing and installing drainage in front of our french doors (to stop the house flooding) they finally decided to install some more land & french drains in next door's garden. After a day a half of two blokes sweating away in the August heat digging trenches they had to wait for the chippings to arrive. Although the developer hadn't requested it, one of the blokes (a contractor) took the initiative to investigate the hole in next doors garden where the water had come up from. To his surprise he found a french drain that had somehow been disconnected.
Two days of labour and the cost of 25m of drainage could have been solved in an hour. At no point did any of these 'professional builders' think to check the drainage plan and investigate the water source. Even the contracts managers had come to have a look. Any high and it would have been the construction director himself - clueless.
From my experience house builders in this country are useless. They all seem to offer the same amount on incompetence. If we could build decent houses for decent prices - there would still be profit - but the availability of more cheaply priced homes would help correct the market.
The way it stands I think a crash/correction is inevitable at some point. Unless loads of people move into the area in 20 years time I have no idea who will buy all the £500k+ houses that will be vacant when all the pensioners die, because they all acknowledge that their kids won't be able to afford them - the houses will probably be remortgaged or sold anyway to pay for healthcare costs the way things are going...
