{"id":109,"date":"2025-02-24T21:10:33","date_gmt":"2025-02-24T21:10:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/?p=109"},"modified":"2025-02-24T21:10:33","modified_gmt":"2025-02-24T21:10:33","slug":"second-homes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/second-homes\/","title":{"rendered":"Second homes"},"content":{"rendered":"

The lovely county of Gwynedd has been in the news for reasons other than its beauty.\u00a0 It made the BBC<\/a>, Guardian<\/a> (Rowan Moore column), Mail (for policy reasons, I don’t link to this outlet) and Telegraph<\/a>.\u00a0 The reason for this interest was headline figures from the Principality Building Society’s house price index for the last quarter of 2024, published here<\/a>.\u00a0 This is based on land registry data, compiled by a firm called Acadata.\u00a0 Gwynedd’s house prices were said to have fallen by 12.4% on this index during that quarter.<\/p>\n

More precisely, this was because columnists and others were able to comment on Gwynedd’s policy on second homes.\u00a0 That is to say, it charges higher council tax on second homes and requires planning permission to be obtained before turning residential property into a second or holiday home – an Article 4 direction<\/a> (links to Gwynedd’s Art 4 designation).\u00a0 The BBC had various local homeowners bemoaning the effects of these policies on their planned sales.\u00a0 An application for a JR of the scheme did not get permission<\/a> because, apparently, the council “had made the decision following a ‘robust and thorough exercise’, invalidating the group’s grounds for challenge”.<\/p>\n

Now, I have to say that there are reasons to be sceptical about this reading of the data.\u00a0 The first is that it involves quite a selective reading of the dataset which is produced by an organisation which has an interest in booseterism.\u00a0 For example, if you compare Anglesey (say) which has a council tax uplift (as most do) for second homes of 175%, there were price increases.\u00a0 It is unclear how one can read this data so as to isolate Article 4 from other external effects.\u00a0 Secondly, the Article 4 designation only came in to effect on September 1st 2024.\u00a0 One would think, therefore, that this would be a remarkably quick impact on house prices.\u00a0 Thirdly, as the redoubtable (and my go to commentator on Bluesky) Anna Clarke<\/a> put it,<\/p>\n

“BBC getting over-excited by shoddy data here. Land Registry data shows there were 82 property sales in Gwynedd in the whole of 2023-24, so you can’t really say anything about house prices from changes from just one quarter’s data.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In summary, it’s too early to write home about the effects of second home policy.\u00a0 And, one might say, if they were dampening house prices to that effect, that would be regarded as a policy success in any event (cf the Telegraph’s “botched” headline) because that may be what the policy was actually intended to do.\u00a0 This might be one of those rare cases where policy-makers actually achieve what they wanted.\u00a0 But, whatever – it’s far too early to say yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The lovely county of Gwynedd has been in the news for reasons other than its beauty.\u00a0 It made the BBC, Guardian (Rowan Moore column), Mail (for policy reasons, I don't […]","protected":false},"author":7123,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[33,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ownership","category-regulation"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7123"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":110,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions\/110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}