Antler New Homes Podcast Episode 1. The BIG opportunities for housebuilders in 2023 with Lucian Cook, Head of Residential Research at Savills.

Are you a housebuilder wondering what 2023 might hold? How your sales and marketing strategy should be adapted for the current market and the year ahead?

In this episode, Lucian Cook, one of the country’s most respected housing market commentators shares his insights on what opportunities 2023 will bring for those housebuilders who “embrace the challenge”.

This episode contains so many golden nuggets of advice. Whether you’re a Sales & Marketing Director, MD, CEO, Marketing Manager…or just interested in the marketing of new homes, this is an episode you won’t want to miss!

Conversation highlights:

“I think that means that, whichever way you cut it, it is going to be a challenging housing market in 2023 for housebuilders to develop into. I think what it will do, inevitably, is that they focus very heavily on their strengths. They concentrate much more on what their selling point is, and what their points of difference might be…”

“Now, that means, and this is the crucial point, whilst interest rates might go up a bit further, bank base rate, particularly as and when you tame the beast of inflation, interest rates come back down the other side. You’ve got a lower stress test to meet than you had previously, and that opens up surprisingly a bit more capacity for medium term price growth…”

“At some point, whichever political party is in power, you can start to see this feeding through into thinking the penny will drop, you know, there are consequences of not building enough homes. There are consequences in the younger generations ability to get on the housing ladder. There are uncomfortable consequences for how long they stay at home for that older generation who are more nimby in nature…”

“It’s not an easy political sell when you’re saying we’re going to release your stamp duty bill so that you can unlock very substantial housing wealth that you’ve built up by virtue of the year you were born. You know, that’s not an easy sell. But the fact of the matter is, if we’re going to get more efficient use of our housing stock, we’ve got to remove some of these barriers and if you looked at if so, for the first time, I think reading the papers over the period of the last two months, you could see that government were at least considering it a long way from necessarily doing something, but they were considering it…”

“The natural order of events is that we blame the planners, isn’t it? And you know, I do think we have an incredibly complicated planning system. There are risks with some of the rhetoric that we’ve heard, that it might get more difficult before it gets better. But I think, fundamentally, you’ve got to continue to bring more land through the system and you’ve got to give developers more certainty that they are going to get planning consent if they’re going to speculate. There’s quite significant costs in terms of promoting that land. And that is, fundamentally, where it starts…”

“I think whilst you need to have regard to local demands and local politics, I think you should have a task force around local planning provision that possibly becomes a support function of central government. So you don’t end up with a situation where planners are just dealing with people extending their homes, soaking up massive amounts of their time when there is a much bigger issue around increasing housing delivery to meet the needs of the population that needs doing…”

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