Forecasts by JLL show that delivery of new homes is likely to be “disappointing” over the next five years, with 150,000 homes built per year by 2017 failing to deliver on the 250,000 needed each year.
It said current proposals by political parties were merely a brick in the wall and promised rates of delivery would fall well short of aspirations.
Overall, the agent predicted transactions would stabilise at around the 1.3m mark each year in the period to 2019, hinting at greater resilience in the market. It forecast house price growth of 4% next year reaching 22.8% by 2019 with the biggest gains in greater London. The North East saw the lowest gains in percentage terms at 17% over the next five years.
Adam Challis, JLL’s head of residential research, said: “Completions of 150,000 are actually pretty normal looking at the long term and there is not the will to move to much higher rates of growth.”
He added: “We take a pretty negative view of the programme put forward by governments to enable delivery. It is not negative in aspiration but its target delivery rates are nowhere near plausible…we need solutions that don’t represent a knee-jerk reaction to the current issues but represent a longer-term prospect and resilience.”
The agent estimated that Help to Buy would deliver the greatest gains of 110,000 units in total but that the policy would run only to 2020. Garden cities, meanwhile, would deliver negligible stock on genuinely new sites, it said, adding that the garden city model was land-hungry and needed considerable political resolve.
