Wednesday, Apr 25, 2007
Is it the Supply or the Demand?
Firstrung: Liverpool city centre could become a ghost town due to over-development
35% of Liverpool's new city centre apartments are lying empty, as an already flooded property market struggles to attract buyers, housing market experts claimed last night
Posted by confused76 @ 07:49 PM (172 views) Add Comment
16 Comments
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1. enuii said...
Add Manchester, Warrington, Preston and many other large towns and cities around and about Liverpool to the list as they are all flooded with 1/2 bed apartments that are already built and empty with thousands more going up by the month!
2. dobber said...
Eee by gum lad, it's started in t'north and it's going to work it's way down to those southern softies.
3. uncle chris said...
I work in Liverpool and can confirm the large numbers of empty flats and yet still more are developed. I really don't understand what the developers are playing at because if they were priced sensibly they would sell in no time. Sadly we will probably have to wait until they go bust before the people that need them can get their hands on them.
4. nearly30 said...
Well call me a snob - i call them Strangeways developments - dull, poorly designed / constructed, uninspiring and likely to be pulled down in 20 years. Real ghettos for the future.
5. Scott said...
Nearly30 highlights an important point that many of you may not realize. Have any of you ever been to Latvia or Estonia? The architects of Soviet Russia went to these places to design apartment blocks that would house the defeated people as "efficiently as possible". Believe me when I say that they are tall, cramped, etc. Recently, civil engineers from this country have been going over there to steal their ideas. Encouraging to think that our teachers, police and fireman will be living like this soon.
6. japanese uncle said...
Who wants to live in monoliths?
7. enuii said...
You're spot on nearly 30, living cheek by jowl in a block chock full of single folks with no room to swing a cat or store anything is no fun. Add in the ubiquitous annual service/maintenance charges and these developments are not worth getting a large mortgage on. I view them as privately funded version of the type of developments that were tried and failed in the 1960's and once some of them are are sub-let you will have the start of a private sector ghetto on your hands.
What on earth is wrong with building nice new versions of the classic Victorian terrace where everyone looks onto a street and has a backyard or small garden? The answer is plain and simply that there is not enough profit in building them for the sort of Greed driven companies that build them.
Fortunately most sane buyers realise this and not being tempted into buying them.
8. nearly30 said...
enuii - spot on with your comments. I live in a 2-bed terrace with smallish backyard - suits me + 1 fine. And with family units getting smaller - is a fine home for someone - and with modern tech - can be made very energy saving and a quality low impact house.
But no - developers want to build cardboard pieces of cr*p that litter the skyline and create boring uniformity. All the 'Units' newly built near me are built to 0.8 scale - with little or no space around them - very small houses - verticle flats at best - terribly dull - red brick and no features - detailing - horrid horrid boxes. Also - you have no space for your wheelie bins - so they just line up in front of them making them prone to littering and just looks untidy - at least I have an allyway!!!!
Terraces are great - always built in pairs and each time you build one - you put your own individual detail on each - we need a new Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin!!!
We need to start re-defining houses as home again - and bring back style above economic margins - even though the Sheeple won't appreciate it - in the future - the houses that last are the ones with style and good design.
9. Talman said...
Yes indeed, nearly30. I live in Liverpool too and agree entirely that when the boom ends and values drop, the attraction of so called luxury apartments will end too. They will become uninhabitable by all but the benefit classes. A return to inner city poverty, deprivation and ultimately, neglect will follow. Liverpool simply does not produce anything to generate the salaries required to buy these so called luxury dwellings. We are also running out of superlatives to describe them. Actually, they really are utter tripe. Cheap land, usually in dodgy areas and night club back-street rat-runs, or built next to legacy rough-neck estates. Rubbish quality, tiny windows, cheap appliances, and ridiculously greedy architectural cram-in designs. You've only got to look at the photos on EA websites to see the over-zealous use of wide-angle lenses to see that you can barely fit in a couple of sofas (as long as you never intend to eat at a dining table again). Oh yes, and forget storage. You'll be lucky to find anywhere to store an Ironing board these days. Buildings almost ready for demolition get a trendy frontage and plenty of plaster-board and before you know it you have a 'stunning' apartment.
10. Scott said...
Nearly30 is absolutely right about classic building. The Romans were arrogant enough to believe their empire would last over a thousand years, so they built roads and bridges that would last this long. The emperialist Victorians believed the same and they built houses/buildings to last. So we have a country with some good old roads, excellent Victorian buildings and houses, and then a load of crap. If you don't expect something to last, why bother building it?
11. lvmreader said...
Liverpool is utterly finished. THe
There are too many quick buck merchants and scammers in that city and mortgage fraud funded a lot of criminal operations and provided a route to launder a lot of cash for organised rings of criminals.
A salary of £30,000 in Liverpool is considered to be raking it in, yet 2 bed apartments are being flogged for £350,000?.
I remember when £350,000 bought you a 5 bed detahced house and 2 acres of land in the best area within the City limits of Liverpool.
The year. 1999
12. george monsoon said...
I have to agree with everything that has been said above. I live in Preston, not a stones throw away from Liverpool. The current wave of construction is almost entirely apartments pushed up in the dodgy (cheap land) areas of town.
They look cheap and will probably not last a generation before they are demolished.
The greed of these developers beggars belief, priced at 250k+ for a 1 bed "luxury" flat.
13. mrmickey said...
This excess of property is no problem for the government, just fill them up with cheap slave labour from abroad.
14. Shipbuilder said...
Apartments going up everywhere in Belfast. Why live in the city centre when it's literally a 10 minute taxi journey from the suburbs? And they're ALL bought, without exception, by landlords. Bargain rents in the next 5 years, they'll be populated by students and DHSS at £200/month, if they're lucky - hardly trendy city living for up and coming professionals...
15. The Eternal Optimist said...
Liverpool City Centre is rundown and filthy. Its main thoroughfare (Lime Street) is a particularly depressing spectacle of boarded up shops, stained 60s concrete, vomit and discarded takeaway meals. The place is an embarrassment; especially when compared with centres such as Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds - which at least look clean and elegant. Liverpool inherited a rich and wonderful legacy of Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian architecture, but has preferred to squander it, in place of ill-thought through development schemes - usually featuring 'Lego Pagoda' style edifices which - being cheap (for the developers), and devoid of attractive detail, seem to be flavour of the month. Historians of the future may wonder why nothing remains to show what sort of buildings people were putting up between 1945-2007. It's because they weren't built to last; had nothing about them to stir the eye or emotion - and because no one cared about them enough to bother saving them from demolition.
16. Shipbuilder said...
Getting carried away with the supply and demand arguement leaves this country, its scenery, its archirtectural heritage, town planning and desirability at the mercy of cowboy builders who care about nothing but margins. Slackening planning laws would be an absolute disaster, judging by the quality of new builds in the UK. I gave a guy a lift home the other day - he lives in a 'new development' - basically 10 identical townhouses, 10ftx10ft 'gardens', no garages, all crammed into the land where there used to be 4 decent size semi-detatched houses. All the houses in each other's shadow, the road through the development was about 3 ft wider than my car. I was actually embarrased for him, thinking, you bought one of these?