Nearly 200 new homes created in 2021 – report
NEARLY 200 new homes were created last year – including 33 affordable housing units.
The annual residential property stock bulletin was published yesterday, with an update on the market.
During 2021, 198 units were created and 43 lost, resulting in an increase of 155 units. Of these 33 were classed as affordable, as they are provided by the States and the Guernsey Housing Association.
That means there are now 27,371 housing units in Guernsey. Three-quarters of these are houses, while the rest are flats.
A third of all properties are in St Peter Port, with 1,404 units per square kilometre. This is more than double the density of any other parish.
Over the last six years, St Peter Port’s housing units have grown by nearly 300 to just more than 9,000.
This compares with St Sampson’s increasing by 131 to 3,970, and Vale increasing by 110 to 4,016.
At the other end of scale, the rural western parishes have stayed relatively static.
Forest and St Peter’s have shrunk by three and one property respectively to 635 and 888.
Torteval remains Guernsey’s least populated parish, with 407 properties – an increase of three over the last six years.
The current Island Development Plan directs new housing towards the main centres of Town or the Bridge, or towards local centres, like L’Islet and Cobo.
‘The density of residential property units per square kilometre is nearly seven times greater in the main centre than outside of the centres,’ the report notes.
Overall three-bedroom properties make up a third of all dwellings, followed by two-bedroom properties, which make up a quarter.
Four-bedroom properties made up just 12% and those with more than four bedrooms 5%. But larger properties have been becoming more common.
‘Proportionally, the amount of units with over four bedrooms has increased the most since 2015 in both the local and open market, with increases of 17% and 18% respectively,’ the report notes.
The net increase of 155 homes last year was a sharp increase on 2020, when lockdown disruption saw an increase of just 67 homes.
Low electricity consumption was used to calculate how many properties are empty in the island.
In 2021 170 units had been vacant for a year or more. This compares with 176 in 2020 and 194 in 2019.
