🌟 Reflecting on Our “Investing in Housing Retrofit” Event at UKREiiF:
The need for #retrofit is clear – 19mn UK homes below EPC C, 6.5mn UK households in fuel poverty. And there’s #value at stake – £530bn+ retrofit market, +20% to valuations, +10% to rental yield. But we still aren’t connecting capital with ‘shovel-ready’ projects.
At this year’s UKREiiF, we brought together public and private sector industry leaders to talk about why this is, and what we can do. A few takeaways…
🏘 The domestic retrofit market is huge, but demand is fragmented – we still need to ‘crack the case’ on aggregation to create investable propositions for institutional investors
💭 One size doesn’t fit all – retrofit needs vary between single-family and multi-family, and by type of resident. Should we think about retrofit by ‘population segment’ rather than by asset type?
👩💻 The technology is there – we have next-gen heat pumps and solar, we have great data and analytics tools (including our 98% accurate predictive stock assessment tool 😉 Sorry 😂!). Traditional installers don’t always know these solutions, though, so adoption lags – we need to educate the supply chain
💷 The #businesscase very much depends on government – the Domestic Minimum Energy Efficiency Standard (MEES) has made the maths work for the ~150k least energy efficient properties, we need higher minimums to move the rest of the market
🏡 We also need ‘technology-agnostic’ grants – government should encourage whole-house retrofit, not ‘pick winners’ by only funding specific measures (cf. the Boiler Upgrade Scheme)
Friends – how else can we better ‘match’ retrofit jobs to investment? Curious for views…
Many thanks to Hugh Garnett, Andrea Carpenter, Charlotte Kirby, Hannah Vickers, Paul Miller, Daniel Mahoney, Debra Yudolph, Eamonn Hughes, Emma Fletcher MRICS, Helena Rivers, William Cooper-Pearson, Ioanna Mytilinaiou, Jane Anderson, Kasang Kajang (she/her), Marylis Ramos, Matthew Ratcliff, Jim Thomas, Dina Beeney, Patrick Bunker, Marion Baeli, Paul Kirkbright, Paul Dobbs AssocRICS, Rebecca Harlow, Samantha Watkin, Steve Matthews, Joe Tetley, Pål Hauff Hvattum, Valentina Shegoyan, Dr Elizabeth Rapoport for joining us.
#sustainability #housing #affordability #netzero #realestate #property
Anna Moore, Chenai Gondo, PhD