1. Halifax, House Price Index, 3 April 2009

2. Chris Giles, 'UK given £75bn new money', Financial Times, 6 March 2009, p 1

3. National Statistics, 'UK worth £7.0 trillion', 28 October 2008, posted on www.statistics.gov.uk

4. Martin Pawley, Home Ownership, London, The Architectural Press, 1978

Can we look to construction product manufacturers?

To Colin Davies, 09.04.2009

Dear Colin

When we began to correspond with each other about Pattern Books in the summer of 2007 the housing market was very different than it is today. The housing bubble has burst, with house price deflation causing a dramatic withdrawal from house building. Total housing production for private sale and rental has halved from the 2007 peak of 200,000, as the following graph shows:

One of the more cautious of regional and national house price indices, the Halifax House Price Index, calculated the average house price in Britain to be £157,326 in March 2009, which is where it was in May 2004. They also noted that the rate of price falls seemed to be slowing, and house buyers are re-entering the market. (1) It is my guess that average house prices will fall to below £150,000, but may not reach £140,000 before beginning to inflate again. Government is doing everything in its power on a world stage to reinflate the unaffordable housing market, reducing base interest rates to 0.5%, and increasing the money supply with innovations in "quantitative easing". (2) They obviously aim to secure the £1.22 trillion of mortgage lending "secured" on British homes by the financial institutions now largely under more direct government control, backed by the Bank of England:

www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/ms/2008/nov/taba5.2.xls

The value of that stock of housing in 2007 was £4,314,000,000,000, or over £4.3 trillion. This valuation dwarfs the turnover of the construction industry, and affects a constituency of 70% of owner occupied households. As Martin Pawley understood best of all, (4) that is why government is much more concerned with the value of existing housing than the process of building new homes. This is not easy for anyone interested in building new housing to accept. It is a crazy situation.

In this recession the construction product manufacturers have enjoyed much less business. I am lucky that my sponsors in the brick and block industry have remained committed to sponsoring technical research into better insulated but thinner wall construction, and the way that relates to house types and housing sites. That is a technological, typological, and topological study that is premised on Pattern Book planning.

(See the bottom of this page for more on IVIS 2009)

However it is not certain that when house price inflation returns, as it will do soon, the major and now more consolidated house builders will want to be "volume" house builders in the way they attempted in 2007.

Another guess, but I suspect major house builders may have no ambition to build "eco-homes" in large numbers, since such housing will tend to be saleable at the luxury end of the market. The "eco" house builders abandoning previous volumes of production will be able to adjust since they are mostly managerial, and can develop their own house types to meet the regulatory changes that are encouraging the shift. But this will mean a permanent reduction in business for construction product manufacturers, even if the fewer homes built and sold to the "eco-investor" are larger in size.

A way for the construction product manufacturers to attempt to recover their lost business, assuming they want to, is then to encourage more house building on the plots that the major house builders are not interested in. The difficulty is that house builders constructing homes in small batches, down to the individual house builder, who may be building a home for themselves, will lack the research, design and development capability required to cope with the regulatory change underway. The potential exists for construction product manufacturers to collaboratively undertake the RD&D required to produce Pattern Books of technically type approved housing for the numerous small batch and individual house builders.

If Pattern Books are to be produced for numerous builders initially unknown to the construction product manufacturers, working on disparate sites across the country, they will need to offer greater architectural customisation without loss of the important technical type approval for compliance with the Building Regulations.

This is a long winded way of replying to the matter you raised in June 2007, of how Pattern Book housing can be controlled by "customers":

Let's allow everyone to participate Colin Davies writes to Ian Abley, 21.06.2007

I think it is clearer now than it was in the summer of 2007 that house builders are increasingly polarised. There are the few consolidated majors pushing for highly regulated "eco-homes" they can profitably sell who will develop their own house type portfolios. Architects will find employment in developing these portfolios of "eco-homes". There are a larger number of batch and individual builders who will struggle to meet Building Regulations. These numerous but minor house builders will appreciate the help of construction product manufacturers, who are in turn interested in increasing their business without jeopardising their fewer commercial relationships with the majors.

The scope for batch or individual customisation, in contrast to the standardisation of, as you said, "take it or leave it" speculative volume house building, will largely come down to controlling the cost of constructing floor space. I think it safe to assume people want space.

The majors can build relatively easily for £800/m2, and will work to avoid the regulatory changes inflating that rate. If "eco-homes" are luxury items the rate may be increased. The Pattern Book effort of the construction product manufacturers will be to assist the minors to build at around £800/m2. The math can be simplified, and relates to the matter of housing affordability, which I have tried to think about elsewhere on this website. Please see:

Plotlands as a measure of affordability 75 years on 05.04.2009

Britain doesn't add up 11.03.2009

At £800/m2 applied to the gross external area a 75m2 home will cost £60,000 and a 100m2 home will cost £80,000. The wall thickness, which is seriously affected by the insulation thickness, will deduct from that area to give a gross internal area, subject to terraced, semi-detached, or detached arrangements. Therafter circulation space planning becomes very important, with stairs, if any, becoming critical over floor to floor heights. Stair arrangements within plan widths must relate to the daylighting of rooms. This, as you know, is the logic of house types.

Infrastructural access and utilities connections may add £5,000, and fit out for kitchen, bathroom, toilet, and utilty room another £5,000. It would be easy to spend £5,000 on professional fees. Let us disregard the fact that land is not available at £5,000 a plot.

That suggests a cost, excluding land, of between £75,000 and and £95,000 for small family house types. If we could repeat the plotlands experience that is a range of between £80,000 and £100,000. If the wall thickness is minimised, and the plan optimised for circulation around comfortable stairs in two or more storey housing, the useable floor area is maximised. Scope for extension should also be designed in.

Pattern Books allow these costs to be addressed:

• Control the £/m2 rate of customisable but tested construction to meet the requirements of the Building Regulations, through the co-ordination of technologies into whole house systems
• Reduce the cost and complexity of utilities connections, while thinking about the periodic upgrade of kitchens, bathrooms, toilets and utility rooms within the life of the structure
• Spread the design fees while sharing the aggregated RD&D across the repeated "pattern", so that professional costs are reduced for each home that benefits from more "design time"

I think the construction product manufacturers will see a valuable role to play under new circumstances, after 2009. You asked:

'So how can spatial design, technical design and consumer preference be brought into a productive relationship so as to provide the adaptable, low-carbon houses that society needs?'

I think the construction product manufacturers might see the advantage in collaborating over customisable Pattern Books. These will be backed with the RD&D that batch and individual house builders will need if they are to build on disparate sites when house price inflation returns.

Do you think this makes sense, or am I too pre-occupied with appealing to the interests of construction product manufacturers?

Ian Abley 09.04.2009

This website is maintained by abley@audacity.org. All material is Copyright © 2000 - 2007 Audacity Limited where not copyright of the originator.