Surveyors: Housing market is a "national emergency"

Mortgages and Home

Updated on 14 May 2015 | 7 Comments

Government must act to boost supply, surveyor body says.

The property market now represents a “national emergency”, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) has declared.

The surveyor trade body said that addressing this “crisis” must be the priority for the new government, after its latest Residential Market Survey revealed the number of surveyors seeing house price rises had hit its highest figure since last summer. This was coupled with new instructions dropping for the eighth straight month.

As a result, almost three quarters of surveyors believe house prices will rise over the course of the next year.

According to the latest Halifax house price index, house prices jumped 1.6% between March and April, taking the average price of a UK home to £196,412.

Government must boost supply

RICS said it was “absolutely critical” that the government focuses on how to boost the building of new homes.

Jeremy Blackburn, head of UK policy at RICS, said that the nation need a coherent and coordinated house building strategy. He added: “This should include measures that will kickstart a supply-side revolution, such as mapping brownfield, addressing planning restrictions and creating a housing observatory to assess the underlying economic and social drivers of housing and provide the impetus for solutions.”

He added that introducing measures like the extended Right to Buy scheme will only serve to further boost demand and won’t help address the problem.

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