Building vacancy rates 'too high'

With high vacancy rates for new city accommodation developments, property experts have claimed that further efforts should be undertaken to make empty flats more available to renters and buyers.

The Empty Homes Agency claimed that a phenomenon dubbed 'buy-to-leave' was seeing new flats in big cities across the UK left empty for long periods – while the lists of budding renters and buyers build up.

Policies for empty flats are under currently under review, with the Empty Homes Agency claiming that many properties are left unoccupied for longer than they should be due to the tax system, which currently exempts empty homes from council tax for up to 12 months.

David Ireland, chief executive of the Empty Homes Agency, said: "There is a slightly different issue now to 15 years ago, when we had homes that were struggling to be brought back into use because of planning problems."

He added that today many developments were complete but now empty, explaining: "There are no signs of dereliction, but in terms of wasted housing resources the case is just that one problem has got better and another has got worse."

The Empty Homes Agency claimed that as many as 663,000 remained unused in the UK, with London identified as one of the cities where vacant properties could be turned to use to avoid an overload of demand on existing rental properties.

News posted on 17th December, 2007