Caroline's sweet on the new homes for sale market

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I’m sensing that there’s been a flurry of panic over at housing minister Caroline Flint’s office during the last couple of weeks.

Unless you’ve had your head in the sand, it’s been hard to escape the bombardment of property and housing market news we’ve been subjected to by the media - house builders going bust, profits down, the credit crunch (if I hear that phrase one more time I’ll be doing some crunching of my own) housing market suffering, the end of the world as we know it etc etc.

In a desperate attempt to increase confidence in the housing market and the delivery of affordable homes, good old Caroline has announced some new measures - also good for residential property developers who have been slowly sinking into a deep depression in the corner of a dark room.

Cash upfront for developers

A total of £270 million has been allocated for housing associations to deliver 3,800 homes for social rent and 1,500 for shared ownership, while the Housing Corporation will be able to offer larger upfront payments to developers who are investing in affordable properties. A new national clearing house is also being set up so house builders can approach the Housing Corporation with proposals to sell their unsold stock for affordable housing.

Property developers can now also bid at any time for money from the affordable housing pot, rather than waiting for the quarterly bidding round and councils will be able to bid for a share of up to £1.87 billion to build new homes or refurbish existing houses and estates.

Desperation or decisiveness?

Whether these measure were born out of desperation to boost moral in the UK residential property market remains to be seen, what really matters is that they’re at least doing something to shock the life back into a downtrodden market. Caroline said:

“My objective is to put together a package of the best possible proposals, working with industry and others to minimise the problems we currently face and create the conditions for a rapid recovery.”

Hear hear.

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