The housebuilding market in East Yorkshire is in a "good place" but faces a number of key challenges in planning delays, materials price inflation and affordability, a senior leader at Keepmoat has said.
Ben Hindley, the firm's land and partnerships director in East Yorkshire, said Keepmoat is seeing sustained sales interest across the region and buyers beginning to look again at "traditional heartlands" of urban areas having coveted rural locations during, and in the wake of the pandemic.
Mr Hindley said that following changing working arrangements, the developer has seen more interest in sites within commutable distances of offices and workplaces.
Keepmoat is targeting the delivery of about 800 new homes per year across the patch serviced by its Doncaster office, up from current levels of about 630.
The firm - which has seen renewed interest for its two-bedroom properties since the end of the Help to Buy scheme in 2023 - hopes to be operating from 18 live sites by Spring next year with 15 people recruited over the past six months to bolster its teams across building, surveying, architecture and engineering.
Speaking to BusinessLive, Mr Hindley said: "We never had that cliff edge drop which we thought we might have had when interest rates went up.
"Don't get me wrong, demand did go down and it's certainly nowhere near what it was post-Covid. I think we're all probably quite thankful for that as it was just an artificial boom and it just wasn't sustainable. Pricing was too high and the number of new homes being sought was just too high for what the national capability is.
"We've just turned back to what is a more normal set of market conditions. Interest is strong from people and interest rates coming down is obviously helping them with affordability as well. You're able to get mortgage rates at less than 4% which is far more affordable then the 6-7% people were getting previously.
"The benefit from building fewer homes nationally is that ultimately there is labour availability from a site perspective and an office perspective. The single biggest problem we have is that whenever we get above 200,000 homes nationally, we're all competing for such a small pool of talent."
Mr Hindley commended the Government's housebuilding ambitions - to deliver 1.5m new homes over the course of this parliament - but said more needed to be done to make the target a reality, including addressing major resource issues in local planning authorities which were said to be slowing down applications.
However, the national drive for homes has spurred land availability which is expected to be plentiful over the next 18 months.
The affordable housing market was also said to be constraining Keepmoat, as Mr Hindley explained: "Registered providers have been able to fill their programmes in a way that they haven't been able to do in the 10-15 years prior and ultimately their cash pots are pretty spent. They're not going to get a proper new programme until April next year.
"So, hopefully that will get announced in summer as that then gives them clarity in terms of what they can be doing, what they can invest in and to what degree. That'll be good in terms of the market tenures rather than just a straight market sale."
