Property Partner, the property investment marketplace has revealed that there are 200,145 long-term empty homes in England alone. The research shows that these empty properties all together are worth around £43 billion. As a breakdown of this statistic, 19,845 of the empty houses in England are located in London alone, this could equate to £9.4 billion when the average price of London property is taken in to account.
Outside of London, Birmingham was shown to be the worst performer with a recorded 4,397 properties empty. This Birmingham Statistic has seen a 13% increase from last year. In other areas of the country there has been a reduction in the number of empty houses; in Leeds the figure has dropped from 4,070 to 2,574 homes.
Although these figures could be concerning or may be confusing, considering the housing demand at the minute, the number of empty homes has actually dropped in England over the last decade by 36.4%. In the Newham area of London there has been a reduction in empty houses by 55% over the course of 12 months. The data from the Department of Communities and Local Government was used in this study by Property Partner. The study looked at data that illustrated the long-term vacant properties between 2005 and 2016 in England.
The West Yorkshire area has seen the highest number of vacant dwellings out of all of the metropolitan districts for the third year in a row with 11,555 empty houses. In all, the value of the property that has been left empty across all six metropolitan districts total £11.7 billion.
In 2016 the number of Local Authority-owned homes that sit empty has been reduced by 12.7% in 12 months. Other than in London, Sheffield has the most vacant Local Authority-owned properties at 762, which is an increase of 0.7%. Sheffield is followed by Liverpool, who have seen their stat fall by 30.5% and Birmingham, where there has also been a reduction of 21%.
