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Places for People plans to buy more offsite homes after £100m deal
Places for People has revealed to Inside Housing that it will buy more modular homes from the factory with which it signed a £100m deal last week.
In response to questions from Inside Housing, a Places for People spokesperson said the housing association would buy more homes from Ilke Homes as part of the joint venture.
Places for People, which owns or manages more than 195,000 homes across the UK, broke the record for the biggest single investment in modular housing last week when it agreed to buy 750 homes from Ilke’s Yorkshire factory for £100m.
The homes will be built through volumetric modular construction, a type of offsite manufacturing (OSM) that Ilke says will deliver homes at twice the speed of traditional construction.
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The spokesperson also revealed that the association expects to have most of the homes in its development pipeline by December 2020 and to deliver the rest by December 2021.
Asked if modular housing had now become mainstream, they replied: “Yes, and it’s essential that it does, if we’re really going to deliver the new homes that are needed in the UK, across all tenures.
“Simply relying on traditional construction won’t enable us to build enough new homes quickly enough so modular/OSM has to become mainstream in UK housebuilding. We believe the Ilke-Places for People partnership can deliver at scale to help achieve this.”
The spokesperson added that Ilke Homes was still working on other deals: “We have been inundated with interest from housing providers at every price point. We’re working to develop homes at a range of price points for a variety of organisations and companies. Some will be for market sale or rent; others will be for affordable rent and shared ownership.”
In an interview with Inside Housing last year, Bjorn Conway, the then Ilke chief executive, said four in five homes to come out of the factory would be earmarked for properties developed by housing associations.
Mark Farmer, the author of an influential report on modern methods of construction, wrote in a column for Inside Housing this week: “In a world filled with hot air, housing providers appear to at last be showing signs of taking some responsibility for changing the way they deliver assets.”
Ilke Homes’ factory aims to get production up to 2,000 new homes a year within the next two years, with an aim to scale up to 5,000 homes a year in the next five years.
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