new housing
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Latest property news
New £1.4billion vehicle for rented homes
The investors behind residential schemes at the Olympic Park in Stratford and Elephant & Castle have merged the developments to create a £1.4bn vehicle for rented homes. Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Company, which is owned by the State of Qatar, property firm Delancey, and Dutch pension fund asset manager APG have merged the assets to create a new company with 4,000 homes, 1,500 of which are already built. The partnership said its ambition was to become the leading player in the delivery of homes for rent in London and other major UK cities over the next few years. The merger is conditional upon regulatory approval. All of the homes will be managed and leased through Get Living London, an existing management and letting platform. Sheikh Jassim Al-Thani, chief development officer for Europe and the Americas at Qatari Diar, said, “This merger between two leading London private rented sector schemes is the first step in what is a much larger endeavour: to significantly increase the supply of new homes in connected and affordable locations in British cities.” The private rented sector (PRS) has boomed in recent years as requirements for sizeable deposits and stricter lending criteria have made it harder…
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Housing Market
Planning delays stifle new housing
A lack of resources within planning departments is one of the biggest reasons for the chronic housing shortages in this country, according to Linea Homes. The niche housebuilder reports that the vast majority of planning applications are being delayed by six months or more owing to what it claims is a shortage of staff and inefficient processes within local planning departments. It is estimated that around 250,000 new homes need to be built in the UK annually to help address the growing supply-demand imbalance in the market, but housebuilders will continue to fail to meet that target year-on-year owing to severe delays with planning applications that could be avoided, Gavin Sherman, Co-Owner of Linea Homes, has said. He commented, “We are not alone in experiencing severe delays with our planning applications that are complete with professional reports and are policy compliant. Local authorities are so under resourced that they simply can’t acknowledge and administer the number of applications they are receiving. Some officers only work two days a week, which makes it impossible for them to deal with the workload they are given.” A recent report compiled by the British Property Federation and GL Hearn, a property consultancy, supported Sherman’s…
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