What happens when house extensions and renovations cease to be an option?
There must come a time in the future when the existing residential market hits saturation point for the possibility of extending a property……
With current construction designs, most developers are looking to build as many houses on a plot of land as they can, obviously to maximise their profits… with that they will use every inch of available footprint to capitalise on ground floor space whilst minimising the garden area allowing no possibility for future extensions. It can be seen with most modern developments, the trend is for designs which already integrate the loft space within the property for accommodation and living space so again, no options there for future expansion.
So where does that leave future expansion to individual properties?
Probably the older houses with the room for such extensions and renovations, but again…. there surely must reach a point where all properties will have been extended or altered to maximum capacity….. which takes us back to the original point of when does saturation point happen in the future and what are the options!
One would assume that this is so far in the future that some alternative design options are in place making this whole emotive subject completely irrelevant, that or we simply keep replacing existing extensions with new designs suitable for current requirement.
This would then have a knock on effect for property prices in general because if the owners of the larger properties are aware of this trend, it could over inflate the house value accordingly.
London is a prime example of this and to overcome such issues, rather than moving because of inflated property prices, and with limited expansion availability, owners are going down and constructing basement rooms….. and in some cases we are not just talking about one level, they are excavating two and even three levels below the ground. This has started to cause concern amongst the industry stating it could have an imbalance with the existing surrounding structures so to overcome this, some local authorities have imposed an alternate development restriction only allowing basement developments every other property and restricting them to one level.
All hypothetical I appreciate but it has to be given some consideration!
