Accent Group plans to sell 160 homes near Durham on the open market after attempts to offload them for £1 so they could stay in the social sector were unsuccessful.
According to Inside Housing:
The 20,500-home group said that 130 of the 220 properties it owns in the village of Horden, near Easington, are currently standing empty due to low demand. A further 30 of the 141 homes it owns in Blackhall are also empty. It is looking to sell them all after ‘exhausting’ all attempts to keep them as social homes.
It said it offered to sell the homes to Durham County Council for £1 but its approach was rejected.
The news reawakens debate about low demand for housing in certain parts of the north of England – and about the impact of welfare reform on social landlords’ businesses.
The group thinks the bedroom tax contributed to the low demand as the largest market for the homes had previously been single people who now found them less affordable.
Claire Stone, director of communities and assets with Accent, said it had worked with Durham County Council and the Homes and Communities Agency before deciding to sell the homes.
She said: ‘We had approached other housing associations and offered them to the local authority for £1 but our approaches were turned down.’
Accent wrote down the value of its housing assets by £4.1m in its 2013/14 accounts after carrying out a review of level at which they are valued on their balance sheet.
Ms Stone said the group will look to dispose of further homes in the two villages as they become empty. It says the homes would require £7m to be spent on them in order to reach quality standard.
UPDATE: 30.01.15 12.58pm
Durham County Council has issued the following statement in response to the news. Sarah Robson, said that the council was ‘extremely disappointed’ with the decision to dispose of the homes and that the council had been trying to secure investment from Accent and the HCA into the properties.
She added: ‘We are currently undertaking a large scale voluntary transfer of our homes to a group structure of the existing providers. The Accent homes require at least £7m worth of repairs to meet the decent homes standard alone, so the council acquiring these houses when it would no longer have housing management functions in place, at the same time as facing savings targets of £250m by 2019, is not a realistic possibility.’ She said it would continue to explore every opportunity to support the community.