To ask who the hell owns all the..

[OftenHangry]

... empty properties?

There is over 200 000 empty properties in England only.
200 000!
There is a housing crisis yet lots of people leave houses to rot and instead new ones have to be built (and they are much dearer to buy).

There is a house near mine which I suspect is empty, so I checked google and this number came up. 200 000....

Gobsmacked. Why would someone just let a house sit empty?

Where I am there is a group of 30 houses boarded up (2-3 bedrooms) which were sold to a London council nearly 3 years ago.

They bought them to house people on their waiting lists yet they're still empty and we have a lot of homeless in our city. It's awful!

I read an article in the newspaper the other day which said that the military rents tens of thousands of properties but as no personnel want to live in them they just sit empty, just in case.

We have lived in our house for 11 years now and around the corner from us there is a house that has never been lived in here the whole time we have been here. There are ladders and building equipment inside so it looks like someone is working on it but they are doing so very slowly! I'd love to know who owns it and what their plans are for it!

DW and I went on a tour of new builds a couple of years ago (TL;DR - they're shit).

Every single development was part of a larger complex, and every sales agent made it a positive selling point that the subsequent phases (a few hundred houses) would be slowly released to market so as not to depress the value of the houses already sold.

The message I took away from that was that we aren't short of houses, just humanity.

(We couldn't view all the new builds anyway, as at least 3 of the show homes were across a gravel car park that wheelchairs can't use. Apparently not an accident either.)

We had an empty house for 2 years. It was up for sale though. It was a shared ownership house in an area that we couldn’t live in any more (had to move for work). It was height of recession when nothing was selling, housing association wouldn’t let us rent it out or sell our share back to them so we were stuck paying for an ‘empty’ house for 2 years. It nearly broke us financially

Channel 4 did a series about these a few years ago (George Clarke was one of the presenters). They hunted down the owners of some, made them habitable and rented to them to families in need of homes. They highlighted the problem in areas with loads of them - entire streets in some cases.

Part of the problem was that they weren't where people wanted to live, particularly the "whole streets" ones.

The house next door to mine has been empty for two and a half years. It was rented out until it fell in to such a state of disrepair that environmental health got involved and the tenants were rehoused. It's been empty since and it literally falling apart - doesn't have much of a roof anymore, the back garden is a weed jungle, the wooden window frames are crumbling to pieces etc. I don't know why the owners won't just sell it, though I doubt they'd get much for it now.
But there's nothing the council can do - they could in theory take legal action against the owners but with a very limited budget it's not a priority.

My exh has an empty property which was left to him by his mum when she died over 15 years ago. He has no interest in renting or selling it and he’s just letting it decay although mows the lawn fairly regularly. Seems such a waste but none of my business I’m afraid. I know he now has to pay full council tax on it, no discount because it’s empty.

Part of the problem was that they weren't where people wanted to live, particularly the "whole streets" ones.

Suggesting again that "housing crisis" is a moveable feast ...

There's a house near my mum that was built on a tiny plot of unused land. It's still unfinished and empty nearly 10 years later. It's now being vandalised.

troels There was something on TV the other day about the military has whole housing estates of houses that they won't let to anyone, just in case they might need them, they are rotting and have been vandalised. So are of no use for immediate use, they need a lot of updating and repair to be livable. What a waste.

Don't think that's accurate, so many Married Quarter estates were sold to Annington Homes and then sold privately, that getting an MQ in Plymouth for example is quite hard. Ditto in and around Portsmouth.

That's exactly what the news report said about the MoD houses though.

Thanks CuriousaboutSamphire.

In that case both the properties of mine would have been classed as empty but in no way were they neglected or abandoned. Probate for example can take months before you can sell a house.

We had an empty house ( our home ) for just under two years. We had relocated due to work and did not know if we would return. Property still had curtains / carpets etc. We were renting in the new area, but did not want to rent out our vacant property due to recent new kitchen / bathroom potential to sell at end of new jobs. In the end we sold it as permanently relocated to the new area.

Just to note that whilst it's right to question the few acres that derelict properties occupy, there might be a better case for asking about the hundreds of thousands of acres held by a few big landowners (your Maj).

You could probably build all the houses needed for every homeless person in the back garden of any number of stately homes.

Rather than building on green space, I think they should look to ex industrial sites. There is a huge factory site in my area that has been empty and vandalised for years and years. They could have built a good sized estate on the site. I think plans are finally afoot to do something to it. I bet there are lots of these sorts of properties.

Where I live, if you leave a property empty for more than two years you have to pay 150% council tax. This was only introduced recently - I don't know if it's had much impact in terms of convincing owners to sell/let it out/move in themselves.

Also, every council has an Empty Homes Officer (usually it's only a small part of their job) l. You can report empty homes to them. I once did this about a house on our street and as a result discovered the landlord was long term sick and struggling, which meant I felt sympathetic whereas before I'd just felt annoyed about having an empty house for a neighbour. He did then get tenants shortly after, so maybe my reporting made him prioritise that property over his others.

I wonder if those figures include holiday homes? A couple of my friends have homes in Cornwall/Devon areas and they are used only two or three times a year.
The buying up of houses in some areas seems to have had quite a negative effect on the full time communities there.

Our council did Homes for a pound to offload some empty ones they owed. Great idea.

I think empty house is when it's empty over 6 months (telegraph).

I honestly don't get it. Why keep it if no one is ever going to use it like your ex @Nannewnannew. What is the thought process there?

Rather than building on green space

Oh I wasn't suggesting that. Just noting that ... well

www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/10/last-1000-years-families-owned-england/

70% of Britain’s land remains in the hand of less than 1% of its population, with a mere 160,000 families owning 66% of it.

I think they should look to ex industrial sites.

The problem is they can be very expensive to make safe. When I worked in London, the site next to my offices was sold for development after 100 years use as a chemical factory. Unfortunately for the vendors, a survey picked up a watercourse before they could sell it, and they were on the hook to clear the site down to over a metre. By the time they had done it, they'd lost any profit. (Just as an example, I left on a Saturday, the site was quiet. I got in the next day - Sunday - and there was a 15metre drilling rig - with full crew - that had been commissioned in an emergency because there was a worry the watercourse fed into the mains water. I'm sure you can imagine the cost of that ......)

I wouldn't want ANY of the empty acres to be built on before all the long term empty/abandoned houses had been put back onto the market.

Then developers can look at brown field and infill sites, develop them if there is still a local need.

Where I live developers are being allowed to take green fields and turn them into housing estates. Great for people who want to move out of the local larger urban areas and to buy/rent comparatively cheaply. But utterly shite for everyone as nobody really listens when locals explain that the water table, the roads, schools, GP surgeries and all other infrastructure won't be able to cope with the increased numbers of people.

We now have about 2000 new homes mooted here - neighbouring larger villages have similar numbers, we guesstimate that there could be almost 10,000 additional homes in the pipeline, all heading for the one road into the nearest city. 1 school, 1 GP surgery all full. The roads are already gridlocked in rush hour, and that's AFTER the total rebuild of one roundabout to ease the jam.

We have no police. Despite the population growing our town, yes town , isn't deemed big enough to have any real police presence. We have an ageing population and the nearest hospital is 10 miles away, along country roads, it takes 30 minutes minimum for any emergency service to get here.

None of the county development includes improving any of the infrastructure out here.

So I'd be out campaigning for Her Maj and other landowners to keep their land empty. Use it for farming, leisure, whatever. But don't imagine that 'all that space' would be better used for housing, at least not without properly looking at the local infrastructure.

Oh, add to the above the months of road closures, 40 mile detours and increased accident rates when water, gas, electricity and broadband all go in separately. And then the further misery of the roads with all those holes and patches caused by the works and the increased heavy vehicle access.

Green space is often still green for good reason!

So I'd be out campaigning for Her Maj and other landowners to keep their land empty. Use it for farming, leisure, whatever. But don't imagine that 'all that space' would be better used for housing, at least not without properly looking at the local infrastructure.

I wasn't suggesting they do give it up ... just pointing out how land ownership works in England.

Although there is a hell of a lot of nimbys that come out of the woodwork and claim it’s about the infrastructure when in fact it’s more that they are horrified by social housing going up near them.

In my area it’s ironic as the loudest prot

Someone in a nearby street owns one, lives in a care home but doesn't want to sell, it is literally falling down. Neighbours have offered to buy it, her family want her to sell but no one can do anything until she dies.

My MIL's cousin owns a property and has been sectioned, again doesn't want to sell, now lives in supported accommodation and has been deemed fit to make his own decisions so he just "visits" it once a month or so. That is also is a state of disrepair and will sell for pennies when he eventually dies

I read somewhere that the real cost of using more rural sites would be more than cleaning up brown sites if the developer were held to also improve the infrastructure like Sainsbury etc are when they build a new store.

But as rural / greenfield sites are usually for housing councils tend not to insist, or the government inspector says no on appeal (as happens out here quite often).

I'd post you the latest local development shocker but then you'd now where I live. But it perfectly illustrates how local people and councils are being ignored... and what can happen when their concerns are realised!