Buy a flat pack home – from Legal & General

ONE of the UK’s biggest insurance companies has invested around £50million in a factory which builds ‘flat pack’ houses.

FTSE 100 giant Legal & General has hatched plans to build a factory near Leeds, which it hopes will churn out 3,000 prefabricated homes a year. It has already acquired a 500,000 sq ft warehouse in Sherburn, just outside Leeds – believed to be the biggest commercial property available to rent in the UK. The vast factory will work much like a car plant – with robots and machines carving big pieces of timber which are then sent further down the production line.

Buyers will be able to help design their own homes when they place an order, and it will be completely built in the factory – including interiors with white goods fitted – before being driven to its destination on the back of lorries. The houses will be targeted at those on low to medium incomes and will cost in the ‘low hundreds of thousands of pounds’. They will also be energy efficient, expected to cost just £85 a year to heat.

Robert Hall, head of business development at L&G’s housebuilding arm, told social housing trade magazine Inside Housing: ‘What we’re doing is true off-site manufacturing.

‘The process we use involves no tradesmen. The homes will be built in the factory – carpets, curtains, white goods, television.’

Legal & General – which has 9m customers in the UK and runs almost £720billion of savers’ money – plans to build other factories across the UK if the project proves to be a success.

Currently around 120,000 homes are built in the UK every year – less than half the 250,000 houses charity Shelter estimates are needed. The Government has pledged to build more than 400,000 new affordable homes across England by 2020.

This is not L&G’s first foray into the housing market.

It already owns 57pc of Scottish housebuilder Cala, and it recently announced it was investing in 3,000 homes in the private rental sector with a Dutch pension fund.

Earlier this month it announced plans to build 1,000 houses in Crowthorne, Bracknell.