962 Solihull Properties lie empty– An injustice for the 8,268 people on the Solihull Council House Waiting List?

Easy problems should have easy solutions  - shouldn’t they?

Problems like Solihull’s housing crisis, where we have a rudimentary numerical problem of too few homes for too many people ... the answer is clearly to build more property in Solihull  but that, unfortunately for those desperately seeking to purchase or let a property, takes a lot of time and huge amounts of money. So what about other solutions?

The most recent set of figures from 2015 state that there are 962 empty homes in the Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council area. So it begs the question, why not put them back into the system and help ease the Solihull housing crisis? There are reportedly 8,268 Solihull households on the Council House list waiting for council houses. Surely, we can undoubtedly all agree that property left empty for years isn’t morally right with the burgeoning Council House waiting list, also not to mention the issue of homelessness.

But a different story emerges when you look deeper into the numbers. Of those 962 homes lying empty, only 114 properties were empty for more than six months. The local authority has to report a property being empty, even if it’s only for a week. So many of the Solihull properties are either awaiting new homeowners or, in the case of rental properties, new tenants. Also most certainly, some properties are being refurbished and renovated, while other properties have homeowners who are anxious to sell but cannot find a buyer.

And this is perhaps even more interesting. Of the 114 long-term vacant properties (those empty more than six months), 104 belong to the council. However, before we all go Council-bashing, there is evidence that suggests these empty council houses may be in need of so much restoration that it’s not worth the Council’s while to do and are in the roughest parts of the council estates, they are properties that even the Council find difficult to fill.

The fact is that the number of genuinely long term empty properties is only a tiny drop in the ocean of the 86,056 properties in the area covered by Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council and even if every one of those empty homes were filled with tenants tomorrow, it would only meet a small fraction of Solihull housing needs.

So what does this mean for all the homeowners and landlords of Solihull? Well it means with demand being so high for rental properties, the certainty of the rental market growing is inevitable because young people cannot buy and councils don’t have the money to build new council houses. This in turn bolsters property prices as landlords continue to buy at the lower end of the market which in turn sustains the rest of the market as those sellers move up the property ladder, releasing others in turn to buy on again.

These are interesting times in the Solihull property market!