1,559 Charnwood Properties lie empty – An injustice for the 1,262 people on the Charnwood Council House Waiting List?
Easy problems should have easy solutions - shouldn’t they?
Problems like Loughborough’s housing crisis, where we have a rudimentary numerical
problem of too few homes for too many people ... the answer
is clearly to build more property in Loughborough - but that, unfortunately for
those desperately seeking to purchase or let a property, takes a lot of time
and huge amounts of money. So what of other solutions?
The most recent set of figures from 2015 state there are 1,559 empty
homes in the Charnwood Borough Council area. So it begs the question ... why
not put them back onto the system and help ease the Loughborough housing crisis?
Whilst they stand empty, 1,262 Charnwood households (not people – households)
are on the Council House Waiting List for council houses. Surely, we can undoubtedly all agree that
property left empty for years and years isn’t morally right with the burgeoning
Council House Waiting List, not to also mention the issue of homelessness.
But a different story emerges when you look deeper into the
numbers. Of those 1,559 homes lying empty, only 646 properties were empty for
more than six months. The local authority has to report a property being empty,
even if it’s for a week. So many of the Loughborough properties are either
awaiting new homeowners or, in the case of rental properties, new tenants. Also
most certainly, some properties are being refurbished and renovated, while
others properties have homeowners who are anxious to sell but cannot find a
buyer.
And this is where its gets even more interesting. Of the 646
long-term vacant properties (those empty more than six months), 172 belong to
the council. However, before we all go Council-bashing, anecdotal evidence
suggests these empty council houses are habitually in need of so much restoration
that it’s not worth the Council’s while to do and are in the roughest parts of
the council estates, they are properties that even the Council find difficult
to fill.
The fact is that the number of genuinely long term empty properties
is only a tiny drop in the ocean of the 66,516 properties in the area covered
by Charnwood Borough Council and, even if every one of those empty homes were
filled with happy cheerful tenants tomorrow, it would only meet a small
fraction of Loughborough housing needs.
So what does this mean for all the homeowners and landlords of Loughborough?
Well it means with demand being so high, especially for rental properties, the
certainty of the rental market growing is an inevitability because young people
cannot buy and councils don’t have the money to build new council houses. This
in turn bolsters property prices as landlords continue to buy at the lower end
of the market (starter homes, etc), which in turn sustains the rest of the
market as those sellers move up the property ladder, releasing others in turn
to buy on again.
These are interesting times in the Loughborough property market!
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