Just for a starter, from The Daily Mail:
A small beach hut with no running water, no toilet or mains electricity, which measures just 13ft by 12ft, has been put on the market - for a staggering £126,000. But what the one-room cabin on Mudeford Spit near Christchurch, Dorset, loses on amenities it more than makes up for with breathtaking views. It boasts some of the most vistas across Britain's most picturesque beaches and further out to sea including the Needles on the Isle of Wight.
Can one of the dwindling number of Home-Owner-Ists and Faux Libertarians who still read this 'blog remind me - what did the vendor of the beach hut do to create and preserve that view? How does the view belong to him? How can he sell off a share in the view if the view doesn't belong to him? What would happen to the value of that beach hut if the council plonked another one directly in front of it? What impact does the presence of that beach hut have on the value of the one directly behind it?
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Over at the BBC is a baffling article about caravans.
Residents do not own the land on which their homes are stationed, but pay a pitch fee to the site owner for the use of that land, and for the use of services such as water, electricity, sewage and management of the estate... Caravan dwellers also report problems when selling their homes. Under law, park owners can charge as much as 10% of the sale cost - and most do. With the rise in property prices over recent years, this means they get a big cut when "second-hand" homes are sold for us much as £150,000.
The caravan owners moan that rents are too high, but admit that a second-hand caravan + pitch still sells for "as much as" £150,000*, so the ground rents can't be that high and they must have some security of tenure, or else a second-hand caravan would sell for no more than the value of a second-hand caravan.
Yet councils cannot refuse to grant a licence to anyone owning a site - except in exceptional circumstances - and so cannot require standards to be met before issuing one.
So how come every farmer isn't doing it, even if the ground rent is only £1,000 a year per caravan plus whatever margin they make on gas, water etc, they can easily fit in twenty caravans per acre and coin it in. And if somebody comes along and enquires whether there is a caravan for sale, why would the farmer let a caravan owner sell his caravan + pitch for £150,000, the farmer could buy a new caravan for a fraction of that, plonk it down at the end of the row and sell that instead.
And why aren't local councils doing this as well? I'd rather take my chances renting a pitch off the council than from a farmer who appears to be able to do as he pleases. Let's just plonk down a million caravans and house prices would tumble... oh, right..
* There are some static caravans at the other side of my village, they sell for around £125,000.
Tuesday 13 March 2012
Caravans
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16 comments:
"And why aren't local councils doing this as well?"
Well, the site owner is a landlord, renting the pitch to the caravan owner, so if the local council did it, they would be a landlord, and the caravan owner would be a council tenant - aha, do I see a "right to buy" on the horizon?
B, OK, so the council sells off all the plots for £50,000 each after RTB discount and then grants itself permission for another caravan site next door - reducing the capital value of the plots it sold to £nil.
As you suggest, we could use caravans to begin sorting out the housing problem tomorrow. Stuff the banks... Ah..
But surely councils can and do refuse planning permission for anyone who has land and wishes to open a new site. The situatio, as you describe it, is that they can't refuse a licence to an existing one.
AKH, we can't have that, can we?
W42, possibly, but that's not how I understand this paragraph:
"Yet councils cannot refuse to grant a licence to anyone owning a site - except in exceptional circumstances - and so cannot require standards to be met before issuing one."
If you have a source that says no new licences are ever granted and only old ones renewed, then I'd be most interested.
No, I have no source, but I read the paragraph quite differently. I interpret 'site', in this context, to be an area with planning permission and established useage for caravans. Not just any old bit of field.
I assume the 'licence' is for other activities essential to the site, maybe sub letting residence or caravan storage/sales and is something quite separate to the planning permission which applies only to land use.
To refuse a business licence would effectively be nullifying the planning permission, so it makes sense that they can't do that.
As for new sites that would be a planning issue. But on my interpretation if granted the owner is entitled to an appropriate licence to run the business.
W42, the article says that council has to "grant" a licence and not "renew" or "extend". It says it "cannot require standards to be met before issuing one".
That sounds rather surprising, I would have expected caravan sites to be the subject of the usual NIMBY veto (aka "planning permission" or "licence") but the article says what it says. I suppose the article might be factually wrong or totally misleading, but the intended meaning of that excerpt seems pretty clear.
I'd be very surprised if Woodsy42 isn't right. If the article was referring to planning permission, then it would have said planning permission. Since you need planning permission to have a campsite for tents on your land for more than 28 days a year, I'd be astonished if you don't need it for a static caravan park.
"We are still on bottled gas and we had no idea, when purchasing our homes, of how inconvenient and expensive this would be."
It's the old story - fools rush in and then expect others to pull them out of the sh*t. You'd think people would do some research on what the pitch owner was like and the site rules and regulations before laying out hundreds of grand on a static caravan, but obviously not. I suspect also that, market forces being what they are, the caravans and pitches at these bad sites are cheaper than elsewhere.
Regarding the view, apparently at one stage all the land with a view over Niagra Falls had been bought up and the owners each built barriers so that one could only view the falls by paying money to the owners to enter the site or use a viewing window or whatever.
On caravans, I think the reason that people are held back from building and living in caravans is pure snobbery. Much like a lot of the anti-development arguments, they are about new homes being uglier than warped medieval barns in chocolate box villages rather than actual hallowed green land.
W42, B, from our everyday experience, we would expect it to be the case that setting up a caravan site requires planning permission. The article is quite possibly wrong, but it strongly implies that you don't need planning permission you need a "licence" and that "licences" cannot be refused.
BE, yes, of course the usual NIMBY rules apply, that's the point, it's not the cost of bricks and mortar pushing up house prices, Prescott the moron was wailing on about these cheap-to-buil prefabs, but they achieve nothing except push up land values to balance out the saving on build costs.
"implies that you don't need planning permission"
But you almost always need planning permission for any and every change of land use. You can't even buy a bit of field and add it to your garden without PP. So I doubt that it's not needed. See http://www.lawsonfairbank.co.uk/camping-caravan-site.asp.
But even if Carvans are somehow an exception and need a 'licence' instead then it makes sense that councils cannot arbitrarily withold one from an existing business just because they don't like the pricing structure or the facilities.
W42, excellent, so you were right and the article was misleading. Now it all makes sense again.
Well we live in a Park Home having moved from an expensive to run, too big for 2 of us, huge council tax three bedroomed detached house last year. We bought a brand new 2 bedroomed home that is low maintenance, low energy and water bills and low council tax. We have to pay a "pitch" fee which makes up some of the savings. You have to be over 45 to live here and on our site there are no pets allowed.
The company we bought off took our house in part exchange and we had loads of cash in the bank. The council still take an amount of tax even though they are not responsible for any maintenance of the site. However, the council stipulate what can or cannot be built (ie a large wooden shed is verboten). The council has blocked the company from turning a run down mobile park into a static modern park for whatever reason. The company fought for a long time but because of council intransigence, they gave up. Therefore, that plot of land continues to run down even further and nobody wants to buy it.
I should have stated that of course the council still collect our waste but they do not even do the street lighting on the park.
TSO, ta for real life examples. Is the run down site next to or near your nice one? Do people still live there?
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