New rural house-builder, Revitalise Homes, launched to acquire land parcels for development
Regional contractor CJ Furey and its house-building arm Oakfield Developments has joined forces with former head of residential development at CBRE’s Birmingham office, Ben Hudson, to set up Revitalise Homes, a rural housing development company specialising in building high quality affordable homes.
With a substantial undisclosed acquisition pot, the company is looking to buy rural land parcels across the north, midlands and south west, and is keen to speak to farmers and landowners who believe they may have appropriate sites. Aiming to capitalise on the government’s softening stance on rural planning policy for affordable housing on rural exception sites, Revitalise Homes will acquire land without planning consent, with a view to developing, primarily, intermediate housing for key workers.
Ben Hudson, land director at Revitalise Homes, explains the timing behind the company’s formation: "Although many other markets, like private residential development, are still suffering from the impact of the downturn, the government is determined to increase our current levels of affordable housing stock. In response to the Taylor Review, the government is amending rural planning policy guidance and, by diverting funds from other departments, has recently committed an additional £1.5bn to secure the creation of another 20,000 affordable homes.
"We are keen to help farmers and landowners to capitalise on this relatively new market opportunity, transferring skill from our experienced house-building team at Oakfield Developments to build high quality intermediate housing, in small proportionate developments, which tend to be welcomed by communities keen to offer housing for local families.
"The government’s agenda and current planning policy is supportive, funding is in place, so now it is a question of identifying and acquiring sites. We are happy to have a dialogue with any farmer who has a site large or small that they would like to explore for development potential, they do not need to have planning consent in place or have the site identified in local plan documents. We can quite quickly help them determine whether it has development potential to enable them to make an informed decision."
John Furey, commercial director of Revitalise Homes, adds: "We have already begun acquiring rural sites and it has been interesting to see how planners have been more supportive of location appropriate, high quality, scaled, intermediate housing development. Each site and location warrants a different solution, but across the board there is a keenness to help address the very real housing crisis, which often leaves young families and key workers unable to afford to stay in their own local communities."
Recent research from the National Housing Federation (NHF) highlighted that one in ten of the population will be on social housing waiting lists in England by 2020, unless an urgent building programme is launched. The NHF warns that if current trends continue, made worse by the economic downturn and greater numbers of repossessions, the total number of people waiting for an affordable home will be 6.5 million, two million more than the original total targeted by Gordon Brown in 2007, when he outlined plans to build three million homes to dramatically reduce waiting lists.
