Montague Report - ARLA Response

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Responding to today's Montague report findings, Ian Potter, Managing Director ARLA, said:

"The Association of Residential Letting Agents (ARLA) welcomes the broad recommendations outlined in the Montague Report.  However we do have concerns over the speed with which public land will be made available, as land prices aren't proving attractive enough to the current owners, be it a local authority, NHS Trust or other public sector body.

"We also have concerns over the planning timescales which developments have but agree that part of the success of any housing policy in the present climate is to get the stalled sites moving. We are a country in a general housing crisis and there is little capital available for building new homes. If the long awaited panacea of institutional investment can be realised, then we may yet see some benefits.

"Any increase in supply will help address the issues of ever increasing rents, as it is a supply and demand driven market. However any institutional investment will look for a reasonable rate of return to satisfy the demands for a return for the pension or insurance fund, whose investors are the general public. PriceWaterhouseCoopers recently released a report which indicated that, until 2025, buy-to-let landlords can expect a better return on other investments and this would be a concern for institutions looking for effective investment vehicles.

"It remains to be seen whether or not a change to affordable house building requirements is a bad thing. Affordable housing has to be paid for by someone and it is naive to think that this rests solely with the developer. More often than not it is the owners in the development that end up underwriting the headline cost."