Remodelling a 1930s semi? Joe Garner MRICS weighs warmer, roomier homes against lost period character and paved-over front gardens.

Half-built schemes lose more value to missing paperwork than to the debt itself. When compliance evidence is missing, the fix isn't a valuation, it's re-measuring what's actually built, proving it, and pricing what it costs to finish.

A 20 per cent charge sits on almost every extension, rewire, re-roof, damp repair and loft conversion carried out on the 29 million homes we already have. This is a decision, and it is the most distorting feature of the tax system as it applies to the built environment. The anomaly is simple. Demolish a house and build a new one, and the work is zero-rated, with VAT on inputs recovered in full. Repair, extend or retrofit that same house, and it's taxed at 20 per cent, with th

Andy Burnham has promised Britain's biggest council housebuilding programme since 1945. That is the headline everyone has taken from his first week in office, and it is worth pausing on the word "council," because it points to a shift in who commissions housing in this country, not just how much of it gets built. For most of the last two decades, private housebuilders have set the pace. They chose the sites, ran the programmes, and instructed the consultants. Councils and reg

Homes England's figures for 2025/26 landed last week, and the temptation in Whitehall to call this a turning point will be strong. The agency enabled just over 40,000 completions, its best year since 2020, alongside more than 42,000 starts on site, and it beat two of its three government targets while lifting completions for social rent by 65 per cent, the tenure that matters most to people in greatest need. For an agency that has spent much of the past decade fielding critic

How AI is affecting projects for SME developers.