It takes courage sometimes to admit to being a property developer. We are not quite in the class of politicians, but we do seem to have joined the ranks of lawyers and estate agents as the scourges of society. Especially if you read The Guardian. When property is critical to life, leisure and economic prosperity, particularly in times of economic turmoil, how have we let this happen? I believe there is no better time than now to try to fix it.
At a recent gathering of industry leaders I attended, the discussion turned to our reputation. Contributions ranged from a refusal to acknowledge there was even a problem to a suggestion that the industry hire a good PR company. Interestingly, no-one suggested that the answer lay in our own hands. Why don’t we just do better?
The property industry I know is fantastically generous. You only have to go to The Props annual lunch to see how quickly those who lead our business put their hands in their pockets to support the charities represented. But when it comes to translating that generosity into how we shape the developments we build, it seems a different set of principles apply. It’s the product of a buoyant market, where demand for new homes is outstripping supply, and the combative process of negotiating planning consents and Section 106 agreements with local authorities. When turning a decent profit is not that hard and success is measured by winning a battle with planners to limit affordable housing levels, it’s not surprising that an interest in the quality of the wider community is often lost.
It comes down to that term we are all bandying about at the moment without a lot of understanding of what it actually means: placemaking. Many volume resi developers will tell you placemaking means planting a few trees. But unless we understand that it is a great deal more than this, we are in danger of building a sea of badly designed, soulless places that do nothing to create long-term value or change the way our industry is perceived.
The government’s latest housing bill contained a number of measures to encourage delivery of more affordable homes, but little acknowledgement of how they should be integrated
into more mixed-use developments. Melanie Leech, chief executive of the British Property Federation, highlighted the issue: “The starter homes policy is all well and good but we need a broader range of different activity if we are to build communities for future generations.”
And where are we building these new places? When demand is high, there’s little impetus for developers to look at places that are more difficult to develop – places slightly further from a transport hub, or requiring a more complex, mixed-use response to make them liveable. These places need help the most.
But there is a chink of light where the market will deliver the impetus for us to think more carefully about what we build – when the development of inspiring places creates the opportunity to deliver value: PRS. The institutional investors who are funding the great rush to build in this sector are interested in long-term, smooth, growing returns. These come from happy tenants who don’t see renting as second-best to buying and who want to stay put, demanding longer, more secure leases. This is good for business – fewer voids, fewer costly change-overs. But how do we keep tenants happy? Give them great places to live and maintain them well.
So we are in an interesting situation where institutional money could be putting pressure on developers to think long-term and invest in complexity and infrastructure at ground level – proper placemaking.
The sweet spot is where this alignment of investment and community benefit spreads to the wider resi development market. If we can see placemaking as a way of making a real difference, then we could be in a place where our interests align with our customers’, where our investors are on the same page, and where the politicians who grant us permission to build regard us as partners, rather than combatants. This is the sort of business than can thrive in a climate of political and economic uncertainty.
Martyn Evans is chief executive of Uncommon
