The housebuilding industry had different concerns about PPG3: it had to develop well-designed, expensive high-density homes with less car parking space and smaller gardens on brownfield sites, and sell them to family buyers looking for a detached house with a double garage in a leafy suburb. True, the increased density ought to increase the profit for developers and landowners, but would it be enough to compensate?
Three years on, the impact of PPG3 is evident in the new-build statistics (see chart). The number of townhouses being built has risen, the number of detached houses has declined and scarcity has pushed up their prices. The public clearly is buying PPG3-type homes, although the product is appealing more to singles and couples rather than families. Overall, the housebuilding industry has seen more pluses than minuses from the policy, but it still believes its biggest challenge is marketing it.
"I fear we are selling homes to people who are buying because they are forced to because they can't find anything else," says James Sunley, executive chairman of south-east housebuilder Sunley Estates. He says his company's Lacuna scheme (pictured) in West Malling, Kent, where homes are built at a density of 25,000 ft2 to the acre, is "close living". He continues: "I'm sure there are people who look at it and say it's not for me. The townhouse is a two-car design, but now we are restricted to one parking space. Less car parking is definitely the hardest aspect of PPG3 to sell."
Smartnewhomes.com, the new homes website, says that only 1.2% of browsers expressing a preference search for townhouses. "We don't get huge numbers searching for townhouses, terraced or mews houses," says David Bexon, chief executive of the website.
"The most common issues raised by potential buyers are the possibility of sound transmission and the lack of car parking," says Richard Eagleton, director of marketing with Wilson Connolly. "Most people would bite your hand off for the chance to live in a regency crescent in Bath, but they don't see the similarity. There is a consumer awareness problem. The detached plot as Englishman's castle attitude still persists."
Like other housebuilders, Wilson Connolly has made changes not only to improve design quality, but also to increase the buyer appeal of the townhouse. "We've learned that a first floor sitting room with a small window is not a nice space, but that a first floor sitting room with a balcony is a lovely space," says Eagleton.
"When we first started creating townhouses, we took a two-storey house and simply added a floor," says Steve Clarke, director of design with the housebuilder. "Now we've designed a new range from scratch." The housebuilder's PPG3 toolkit is not a package of standard housetypes, Clarke hastens to point out, but contains standard floorplans, and ingredients that can be added to a site to create a continuous street frontage, including bridge links and angled units, as well as linear apartments that are designed to resemble townhouses.
"Maybe the government should run its own publicity campaign on housing like those it runs on health," suggests Philip Hogg, marketing director with Miller Homes, which develops outside the South-east, where buyers are less used to high-density living and PPG3 is reckoned to be a tougher sell. "A lot of our buyers aspire to the four- or five-bedroom detached house, and perceive a terraced house as old-fashioned," he says. E E "With higher value properties, we have the problem that buyers expect a double garage, and a townhouse has a single integral garage."
The housebuilder recently commissioned a survey of buyers of its three-storey homes. The research found that people regarded the ground floor as similar to a basement, suitable for a utility room and maybe a garden room. They liked having the key living space at first-floor level, and quite liked having the master bedroom there, too.
Miller also found that design quality, a factor that PPG3 forced on housebuilders, is a big hit with the buying public. "Customers are looking for more inspirational ideas. With a classic detached house their view is, it's OK, but we've seen it before," says Hogg. "The floorplate of a terraced home is usually rectangular, but we've found that it is important for us to add novelty where we can, whether in the way the stairs run or in the shape of the rooms." So does that mean that the public will pay more for it? Yes, says Hogg. "But that is a truism for any good design."
Earlier this year, design watchdog CABE published a study to determine the value of housing design and layout, carried out by FPDSavills Research. The study compared four PPG3-compliant high-quality developments with four old-style ones. "The research showed that almost without exception build costs were higher for the PPG3-compliant schemes, although I think that as housebuilders build more schemes those costs will come down. But the gross development values were higher in all but one example," says Yolande Barnes, head of research at FPDSavills. "The CABE work shows that there is more profit in designing well."
When it comes to marketing the product, Barnes believes that housebuilders should focus less on their traditional family buyers and more on the new market of singles and couples. "So many developers are caught up in the mindset of the buyer of the past. The new wave of homes won't appeal to the same set of buyers," she says. "New build traditionally accounts for only 10% of the buying market. This has opened up the other 90%."
Barnes has no time for the argument that housebuilders and landowners have reaped big profits from upping the densities on sites. "A few clever pioneering developers have benefited from having higher densities, but the increasing demands of section 106 [planning gain] agreements mean that it has been given with one hand and taken back with the other," she says. Robert Robinson, land director with estate agent Curchods agrees.
"There is an old-fashioned idea that putting more houses onto a site increases the price per acre. But the increased requirement for social housing is taking a quarter off the value," he says.
Overall, the housebuilding industry is positive about PPG3. "It has been the greatest shot in the arm for housing design in a hundred years and there is a high level of enthusiasm for the guidance – although it has been a major management headache for housebuilders," says David Birkbeck, chief executive of Design for Homes. The design-promoting organisation has carried out its own PPG3 impact study, and will be publishing the results in the summer. Its responses from housebuilders included such positive comments as: "It is easier to make houses look attractive with less parking," and "it makes us look at what we're building and why".
But Design for Homes' research shows that, although housebuilders are getting to grips with PPG3, some local authority planners remain ignorant of its demands. "It has done nothing to speed up the planning process," says James Sunley. In fact, PPG3 has placed housebuilders at the heart of conflict between national and local politics. Design for Homes' upcoming study names and shames local authorities that are regularly rejecting schemes for being too dense. "Housebuilders feel that having learned, they want to see proper treatment from the local authorities," says Birkbeck.
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