Is build-to-let the answer to the housing shortage?

Britain’s housing shortage would be fixed by encouraging investors to fund the building of properties specifically for rent.

That’s the suggestion from Sir Adrian Montague in a report looking at the rental market, commissioned by the Government, which was published this week.

And his big idea focused on building properties tailored to the rental market. Montague came up with a number of recommendations to help speed up the building of private-rented homes.

These include:

• Allow councils to ignore requirement to build specific number of affordable properties on new developments. Currently developers claim that the affordable housing quotas make some developments unfeasible.
• Set up a task force to encourage and support build-to-let investment from the private sector.
• The Government should provide ‘targeted incentives’ to encourage build-to-let models, such as sharing development risk.
• The Government should allocate some of the public sector land and buildings which is currently earmarked for housebuilding instead to build-to-let developments.
• Sites where there is good demand for rental housing should be identified and made available to developers on the condition that a percentage of the homes will be let.

You can read the full report, which has already won the support of Housing Minister Grant Shapps, here.

What do you think? Should affordable homes quotas be ditched so that we can build homes specifically for the rental market?

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