Local authorities in the North Devon towns of Barnstable and Bideford are looking to work with property investors with an interest in landlord insurance to ease the pressure on the housing waiting list.
With 3,000 people on its housing waiting list North Devon Council have launched a new Empty Homes Policy which it hopes will see up to 500 homes currently lying empty brought back into use, and providing homes for people desperate to get off the housing waiting list. The council believe they have already identified hundreds of homes lying idle and have used council records such as council tax bills to try and identify the absent owners. They are also calling on the public to identify homes not in use and promise to investigate any leads.
In fact the policy could be good news for many owners as the council have stressed they will work with willing owners to get the properties back into habitable condition and will even help them find a tenant. North Devon’s Executive Member for Housing, Faye Webber, is keen to persuade absent owners to contact the Homes and Communities Agency and said “I think we need to do all we can to help young families who cannot afford to buy, More than 2,800 people are currently on the housing register, waiting for a home in North Devon district, so I feel sad that about 500 homes in our district have been empty for more than 12 months.”
The new policy will allow North Devon to place a compulsory purchase order on a property in exceptional circumstances but at the moment the team are just trying to contact the owners of the properties and persuade them to realise how they can help themselves and the North Devon community as a whole.