Last week saw an unprecedented number of press articles about house prices – which seem to be going up, down, staying the same, particularly if you are in London, or by the seaside, or in the north, or in the south.  The only thing experts seemed to agree on was that they disagreed.  I have worked in property for nearly two decades and even I was completely confused.

But I did read one statistic that I thought made perfect sense.  And it was this.  House prices are set to be 16 per cent higher by the end of 2015, following a four-year recovery in the market that will start late this year.

According to the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), property values will start to stabilise towards the end of the year, when the UK’s property shortage will once again underpin prices.

At last, someone has looked past percentage drops and percentage increases here and there looked further ahead than this time next month and seen the stark and frightening truth.  We do not have enough houses to accommodate our growing population.  Come the end of this year,the repercussions of that will really start to kick in.

In their report, my new friends at the CEBR said that with just 130,000 new homes built in 2010, (around half the level needed to keep pace with the growing number of households) prices should increase by 16 per cent between 2011 and 2015.

I don’t know if the increase will be 6, 16 or 26%, but I do know this.  By early next year, there will be more people looking for houses than there are houses.

That’s because, in the third quarter of 2010, planning permissions for new homes were at one of the lowest levels in the last five years, and the second lowest of the last nineteen quarters. In fact, in 2010 the number of new homes built was at its lowest level since 1923.

And, thanks to the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, we still don’t have a clear and coherent planning policy so these numbers don’t look set to improve any time soon.

So, having tried to make sense of the inconsistencies in house price statistics last week, I gave up.  It is a pointless exercise. All I need to know is this:  despite several years of warnings from the house building industry, the UK now has more households than houses.  It is a dreadful situation, and one that could have been avoided, but it wasn’t.

Of all the numbers I saw last week, only one really scared me and it was this by 2025, Britain will have 750,000 fewer homes than it needs.  The sooner the press concentrates on this number instead of the average price of a home last month compared to this, the better.

There are bigger things to worry about and in just over ten years time, three quarters of a million people will very sadly be evidence of that.

Sue Warwick – National Sales & Marketing Director, Miller Homes