Housing market assessments

What are they?

Divining the vicissitudes of the housing market has long been part of the black art of estate agency, but now councils are being pressed to get to know property hotspots and notspots in their areas.

The pressure comes in the draft of a revised PPG3, which includes a requirement for local authorities to ascertain housing demand and need in their area so that they can ensure that housebuilders build the right sort of houses to keep the market in balance.

How will councils do that?

The ODPM has produced two draft discussion papers by Three Dragons Consultancy and the Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research to explain who should be involved in carrying out the assessments, and what information should be used to formulate them.

The assessments are intended to take into account the whole of the housing market, and replace the local housing needs assessments that helped local authorities to determine affordable housing provision. They will therefore involve a range of players, perhaps crossing local authority boundaries. One option being promoted in the draft guidance is for councils to form a local housing partnership, drawing in people from such sources as government offices, regional development agencies, private housebuilders, the Housing Corporation and English Partnerships.

What will LHAs be based on?

The kind of strategies and data that these partners could be pulling together to produce the assessments could include regional economic strategies, regional spatial strategies, local transport plans, lettings data, house price statistics, housing need figures and a lot more.

What impact will LHAs have?

The methodology is not so dissimilar to that applied by property consultants to carry out housing needs assessments or appraisals of large schemes. The assembling of such data should give councils a better understanding of their own market, and it could also be applied to help identify areas in danger of failing and allow problems to be remedied before full-scale regeneration becomes necessary.

Source

RegenerateLive