Property

HERE FOR YOU IN St Ives

Whether it’s a place to save your pennies, a place to call your own or just peace of mind, we’re here to point you in the right direction.

MEET THE TEAM AT YOUR LOCAL AGENCY

Lanhams Property Management 11 High Street St Ives, TR26 1RS 01736 792 129

Yorkshire Building Society is a member of the Building Societies Association and is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority. Yorkshire Building Society is entered in the Financial Services Register and its registration number is 106085. Head Office: Yorkshire House, Yorkshire Drive, Bradford BD5 8LJ. ybs.co.uk

Property: ‘We need more affordable homes for locals’

In a previous life, I was property editor at the Cornishman and West Briton newspapers, writes Darren Norbury. In the late 90s and early 2000s it was not unusual to publish 96-page supplements, packed with estate agents’ latest listings.

“The phone would start ringing at 8.30 on a Thursday morning,” says Steve Cross, owner of St Ives’ Cross Estates, as I chat to him about the current market. How things have changed. Twenty years ago, agents had large numbers of properties on their books. These days, more have between five and ten.

The problems are well advertised. St Ives’ popularity, which has risen exponentially since about the time the Tate opened in the 1990s, has meant an increasing number of properties becoming second homes. This has been pricing local families out of the local market.

By 2016, local people had had enough and adopted the St Ives Area Neighbourhood Development plan. This has a clause in it, clause H2, more popularly known as the second home ban. But it seems this may have had unintended consequences. A study by the London School of Economics in 2019 concluded that the ban may have had a detrimental effect on the local construction industry. It looked like H2 had actually reduced the availability of homes to local buyers with builders deterred from construction of affordable housing stock. Instead, second home sales focused entirely on existing housing stock.

As I chat to Steve Cross, he reveals something I wasn’t aware of. That the number of local properties being used as second homes actually appears to be falling. Not that these properties are falling into locals’ hands. No, it seems the pandemic is the driver. Whereas ‘upcountry’ buyers had been purchasing as tourism investment in the past, the last two years have taught them that they can work from home, and if you’re going to do that it might as well be somewhere where you can have a high quality of life. Like St Ives.

It’s clear what Steve considers the solution to be. Even as an agent selling freeholds, he’s a keen supporter of building more homes for rent, not just for local families but also for the town’s huge numbers of hospitality and other seasonal workers, who have seen flats they may have stayed in before now snapped up as Air BnB venues.

“We need more social housing to rent, with long tenancies,” says Steve. Somewhere families know they will have security for those early vital years, perhaps raising children. Whether new social housing will be built, though, is another matter. New homes, whether for rent or sale, are getting more expensive to build by the day, due to the labour shortage and rising material costs. As an estate agent with a social conscience, Steve feels pessimistic about the outlook for young local buyers. “Yes, we need more affordable homes, but I don’t think you can build a three-bedroom semi for less than £200,000.”