I had an out of body experience the other day. I met an estate agent
in the street – we’d met a number of times before when I’ve been buying and selling – and we had a long chat about how the credit crunch
would affect the state of the housing market, and in particular his profit margin.
By Lucy Searle
4Homes Essentials
Property Search
UK Region Ratings
Surprisingly, he wasn’t overly worried about his fortunes – he’s ridden the rough seas of the housing market before and isn’t about to be phased by a rocky patch. More surprisingly, or perhaps I’m slipping towards ‘astoundingly’ here, he said he felt that the drop in house prices was a good thing.
Why? Not just because it would help first time buyers , he said, nor that he thought recent house prices in our part of London had reached a ridiculous high (although he admitted they had), more that he felt it would be a good thing if people moved less. At first I thought he was making a joke… until he explained himself. He said that he felt that the more people bought, did up, sold on, and so on, the less likely it was that they would bother to get to know their neighbours, care about the fortunes of the road, and more widely, the neighbourhood. He said if people had to stay put, they’d make more of an effort to get on with their neighbours and invest in the community more.
Obviously, I’m nominating him for the Nobel Prize, but facetiousness aside, he’s got a very good point. Investing in your community is not about whether you’ve bought or merely rent in an area. It’s about staying put in it long enough to care about what happens beyond your front gate – and not seeing the area you’re buying in as an investment that’s purely financial, but one that’s emotional as well.
There’s an exciting new programme coming up called Kevin McCloud And The Big Town Plan. It follows a town’s and community’s regeneration. Far from being a dry lecture about how smartening up a local park will make the surrounding houses more valuable, it promises to be a fascinating insight into how regeneration empowers the local community, gives them enormous emotional investment in an area, and creates a better place for everyone to live. We’re planning to give you lots more info over the next few weeks about how you could go about regenerating your own area – and would love to hear your comments. I’ve heard that the projects in the town you’ll see on tv have changed the lives of the majority of the inhabitants of the town for the better. Bet they won’t be moving soon.
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