YOU HAVE YOUR SAY
THREE-BEDROOM HOMES THAT ARE SCARCELY BIGGER THAN A SQUASH COURT
EVERY week, Money Mail receives hundreds of letters and emails about our stories. Here’s what you had to say about our investigation into the developers flogging first-time buyers tiny homes.
WE LIVE on a small development built in the early Nineties. I often think that if it was being developed now, there would be far more houses with much smaller gardens and no double garages.
O. W., Halifax, W Yorks.
THERE are lots of reasons not to buy a new-build: tiny rooms, lack of built-in storage, not enough space for wardrobes, lack of solid internal walls — just thin partitions to which it is impossible to securely fix anything heavy — and tiny back gardens with no sunlight for most of the year.
B. B., Peterborough.
NON-MILLIONAIRES have always had to live in small houses — and in days gone by you’d find a family with ten kids living in a house that size. Both the ‘minuscule’ living room and kitchen-diner described are bigger than ours.
L. Z., via email.
AS A chartered surveyor since the early Eighties, I can honestly say: do not buy now. Astute people are getting out of property.
N. L., via email.
I WAS looking at homes in America the other day. There were gorgeous, huge properties with land, for sale for the equivalent of £150,000. You can’t get a shed in London for that price.
A. D., London.
WE ARE living on a small island with a massive, growing population — what do you expect?
M. R., Surrey.
THE problem is not unscrupulous builders but lack of land on which to build. Much as we would like to keep Britain green and pleasant, we have a severe housing shortage. Keep our National Parks by all means, but there is plenty of potential building land currently designated as Green Belt.
T. Y., Stockport.
THERE is so little competition amongst house-builders that they can charge what they want for whatever poorly built rubbish they want to sell.
The new blocks of flats in and around Cambridge, for example, look Soviet and are absolutely tiny. We need to open up affordable development space to smaller builders who can construct their own designed houses.
S. L., Norfolk.