propertytalk Live!

Connells Land & Planning Division has been awarded a multi-million pound land instruction from Capel House Property Trust Limited to manage the sale of land in North-East Daventry, Northamptonshire.

Monksmoor Farm, a 125-acre development opportunity with planning permission approved by the Secretary of State for up to 1,000 new homes including 350 affordable homes, will  come to the market in September 2010. 

An estate in West Ealing, London, is to be transformed with high-quality new homes and community facilities after Ealing Council gave the green light to a massive £136m regeneration project.

The Green Man Lane estate regeneration team, which includes local housing provider A2Dominion, developer Rydon and architect Conran & Partners, was granted outline planning permission for the masterplan and detailed planning consent for phase one of the scheme.

House builders must take responsibility for improving energy efficiency in homes.

This is the message from Gordon Miller, sustainability and communications director for Sustain, a social enterprise committed to raising awareness of environmental and social sustainability.

Activity in the local construction market fell further in the second quarter of the year, according to chartered surveyors.

The latest RICS Construction Market Survey shows that Northern Ireland is the UK region with the largest number of construction sector chartered surveyors experiencing declining workloads.

There were 28,590 seasonally adjusted house building starts in England in the June quarter 2010. This is 13 per cent higher than in the previous quarter and 84 per cent above the trough in the March quarter 2009, but 42 per cent below their March quarter 2007 peak.

The latest national statistics on house building were released under the auspices of the UK Statistics Authority on 19 August 2010.

Sentiment in the construction sector began to decline again in the second quarter of the year, as fears over the scale of public spending cuts and ongoing uncertainty about prospects for the economy hit the construction industry, says RICS.

Despite some encouraging signs at the beginning of the year, latest data shows seven per cent more surveyors reporting a fall than rise in total construction workloads. This is in comparison to the previous quarter where five per cent more surveyors reported rising, rather than falling workloads.

Although recent ONS figures for construction output in the second quarter of the year show a sharp increase of nearly 9% over the first quarter, the Construction Products Association warns that the industry is still in a very precarious position and the figures do not indicate a dramatic recovery in the industry’s fortunes.

Commenting the Association’s Chief Executive, Michael Ankers said: ‘Today’s figures show the strongest quarterly increase in output in nearly 50 years, but they flatter to deceive.

The price of greenfield and brownfield residential development land rose by 6.1% and 3.7% in the second quarter of 2010 according to Knight Frank.
 
This most recent price growth means that prices for both greenfield and brownfield land have risen by 20% over the 12 months to June this year.
 

Prices for farmland remain high, driven by increased demand for commercial farmland and a continued lack of supply, according to today's RICS Rural Land Market Survey.

Over the past six months 47% more chartered surveyors reported a rise rather than a fall in demand for commercial farmland.

The Government this week has announced it will be introducing an Exceptional Hardship Scheme for people living on the proposed route of the London to Birmingham high-speed rail link (HS2).

The compensation scheme opens on 20 August and will cover all types of property, but not those over the tunnelled sections of the proposed route.