With over 150,000 people on housing waiting lists across Yorkshire, building the affordable homes that people desperately need is crucial to meeting this demand.
But there’s a significant number of homes that are often overlooked in the housing crisis: empty homes.
There are around 700,000 empty homes across England - that’s around the same amount of all residential properties in South Yorkshire. And of those, 261,471 are classed as long-term empty homes, meaning they have been left vacant for more than six months.
If all empty homes were brought back into use, we could take a significant step towards solving the housing crisis nationally.
Every empty home represents a missed opportunity for families and young people struggling to find a place of their own to rent or buy. That’s why Yorkshire Housing created a dedicated team to tackle the issue and ensure more people can have a place they’re proud to call home.
Our team work hard to ensure every empty home is ready to re-let as soon as possible and this is only done through close collaboration with colleagues in our repairs, customer, home ownership, and schemes and supported housing teams.
As soon as a customer moves out, we work together to reduce turnaround times and get our homes looking their best ready for the next customer.
We know empty homes can become eyesores and cause problems such as antisocial behaviour, so we bring them quickly back into use because we care about the communities we serve.
Empty properties are also a wasted financial resource. They cost money to maintain and represent a considerable amount of lost rental income for landlords across the country.
As a not-for-profit organisation, we invest everything we make back into our homes and services. So, the quicker we can re-let empty homes, the more money we can invest in upgrading our existing homes, building new ones and improving services for our customers.
How we're making a difference
We’ve come a long way since the empty homes team launched last year. We’ve more than halved our number of empty homes to 60 and we’ve also reduced average turnaround times from 45 to 15 days. We’ve also grown the team from 27 to 46 colleagues.
During this time, we’ve introduced our Empty Homes Lettable Standard which sets how we make our homes safe, clean, warm and energy efficient.
We create homes and places people are proud of, and a big part of this is making sure our homes meet high standards. It’s our aim that this will raise standards not just for social rented homes, but across the private sector too.
Taking a new approach to tackling empty homes means we can avoid lost rental income and invest more into our support services. This includes our tenancy and money coaching teams which are there to help reduce arrears and provide early intervention for customers so they can stay happy in their homes for longer.
A crucial tool to tackle the housing crisis
Empty homes come in all shapes and sizes – and some sit vacant for longer than others for various reasons. This past year, we had 10 homes that were vacant for more than six months and six homes which were empty for over a year.
But we’ve now reduced these figures to just one long-term empty home thanks to a renewed focus on tackling the longstanding issues that keep our homes out of use for longer than needed.
Our repairs service has also been brought in-house across to build on last year’s expansion of the team and offer better value for money for our customers.
With housing demand at an all-time high, bringing empty homes back into use is an essential tool to help tackle the housing crisis.
We’ve made great progress since the launch of our new team, but we’re not stopping there. We’ll continue to reduce our number of empty homes, speed up turnaround times and cut carbon emissions by making all our homes greener.
That’s because we believe everyone deserves a safe, warm and affordable home.
By Cath Mustafa, Head of Empty Homes and Repairs at Yorkshire Housing.