Nearly Nine Babies Born for Every New Home Built in the Past Five Years in Worthing

Date Published 20 June 2018

Nearly 9 babies have been born for every new home that has been built in Worthing since 2012, deepening the Worthing housing shortage.

This discovery is an important foundation for my concerns about the future of the Worthing property market - when you consider the battle that todays twenty and thirty somethings face in order to buy their first home and get on the Worthing property ladder. This is particularly ironic as these Worthing youngsters' are being born in an age where the number of new babies born to new homes was far lower.

This will mean the babies being born now, who will become the next generation's first-time buyers, will come up against even bigger competition from a greater number of their peers. This is unless we move to long term fixes to the housing market, instead of the short term fixes that successive Governments have done since the 1980's.

Looking at the graphs above with the most up to date data for the area covered by Worthing Council it can be seen that in 2016, 3.66 babies had been born in Worthing for every home that had been built in the five years to the end of 2016 (the most up to date data). Interestingly, that ratio nationally was 2.9 babies to every home built in the ‘50s and 2.4 in the ‘70s. I have seen the unaudited 2017 statistics and the picture isn't any better! (I will share those when they are released later in the year).

Our children, and their children, will be placed in an unprecedented and unbelievably difficult position when wanting to buy their first home unless decisive action is taken. You see, it doesn't help that with life expectancy growing year on year normal population growth nationally is rising by two people for every one home that was built since the start of this decade.

Owning one's home is a measure many Brits to aspire to. The only long term measure that will help is the building of more new homes on a scale not seen since the 50's and 60's, which means we would need to aim to at least double the number of homes we build annually.

In the meantime, what does this mean for Worthing landlords and homeowners? Well the demand for rental properties in Worthing in the short term will remain high and until the rate of building grows substantially, this means rents will remain strong and correspondingly, property values will remain robust.

If you have any questions about this article, please do not hesitate to contact me.

All the best

Matt

01903 608080
07739 964668
matt@matthewanthony.co.uk