SIMON LAMBERT: Building your own home can beat high house prices, so let's make it easier to find somewhere to do it
08-29-2014
By Simon Lambert
‘Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.’ That classic Mark Twain-attributed quote may often get wheeled out for property-related reasons, but if you are hoping to buy any to build your own home on you’ll find it heavy going.
A plot was hatched three years ago by the Government to encourage more self and custom build homes.
Empowering a small army of Britons to start building their own grand - or more modest - designs was touted as at least part of the answer to our twin problems of not building enough homes and too high house prices.
Grand Designs: Kevin McCloud's Channel 4 property show has put building your own home on the minds of many more people, but finding somewhere to do so is a problem.
Grand Designs: Kevin McCloud's Channel 4 property show has put building your own home on the minds of many more people, but finding somewhere to do so is a problem.
The plan hasn’t been a sparkling overnight success, as demonstrated by the lack of high-profile MPs continuing to loudly bang the drum. Things have moved slowly ahead though.
The Self Build Portal website has been set up, TV property star Kevin McCloud has been enlisted, and the Government has eased a few restrictions here and there, and even muttered about a Right-to-Build idea in this year’s Budget.
Yet the problem remains the small matter of finding a place to build your home. This is where an idea comes in that I like - encouraging councils to free up land for self-builders.
More...
Can you make your dream home come true? How self build can deliver your grand design
The ultimate DIY investment: Novices urged to self build to solve housing shortage - and make a 30% profit
Can you find a better mortgage? Check the best buys and get free advice
This has been a slow burn, but some interesting news emerged this week. Oxfordshire’s Cherwell District Council has bought the land for the UK’s first large-scale self-build project, with planning granted for up to 1,900 homes, ranging from detached houses to flats.
The land at Graven Hill, near Bicester, has been purchased from the Ministry of Defence, and budding self-builders can register their interest now, with even the prospect of teaming up to build terraces and apartments raised.
This site is ambitiously big and likely to remain unusual, but other councils should be nudged towards coming up with similar plots, even if they’re just for tens or hundreds of homes.
Ambitious: An artist's impression of the Graven Hill site
Add Product
Ambitious: An artist's impression of the Graven Hill site
I don’t think that self-build is the solution to our property market troubles.
There are only about 11,000 self-build homes completed each year, so even doubling that would only deliver just over 20,000. To put that into context, England is judged to need about 200,000 to 250,000 new homes a year, depending on whose figures you use, while in the year to March 2014 112,000 were completed.
Such a small increase in supply would barely dent the market, and arguably cheap credit plays the bigger role in allowing property prices to rise far in excess of wage increases.
On an individual level though, self-build can make financial sense, although experienced hands are keen to stress it is very hard work and always return to the difficulty of finding land it is possible to get planning permission on.
A self-build home can typically be worth 25 per cent more that the cost of building and land once finished, dependent obviously on location, sentiment and how well you watch the budget.
It’s also a chance to get a home designed how you want it and a brand new property that doesn’t suffer from the common complaint levied against most new builds in this country - that they simply just aren’t big enough and all look the same.
Building your own will always be a niche area, and I’ve probably been swayed by too many episodes of Grand Designs (and Sarah Beeny’s slightly less ambitious extending programme Double Your House For Half The Money) but I would quite fancy it and whenever we write about this it is clear that many others like the idea too.
Shouldn’t every Englishman have the chance to build his own castle?