It feels like for as long as I can remember people have been talking of green shoots and the road to recovery, but are these phrases of optimism finally starting to bear fruit?
With the UK housing market showing signs of resilience, where should we be looking next, or is it just in another bubble? I am no economist, so no authority but I have been speaking to people in the industry and their does seem to be a new wave of confidence out there.
Some may argue the recent peak is only a direct response to the Governments latest incentive to encourage buyers into the housing market – with their 'Help to Buy' scheme, offering homebuyers access to loans with as little as 5% deposits. With land banks at what I would imagine to be an all time high, are we going to start seeing more redundant sites being put to use and new housing developments springing up?
Sceptics are already saying this is only going to push house prices up even further, creating another artificial market. Either way, you can't win! There's a demand, we keep hearing of the ever increasing populous, so why not build?
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Looking at the London skyline it's hard to believe we’re still teetering on the edge of recession, as its starting to tell a different story. As a good measure people commonly gauge construction activity by the number of tower cranes over the city. These definitely appear to be on the up in London, so does that mean a resurgence of major projects and the grand schemes that we saw pre-2008?
Admittedly some of these projects or schemes that are now in the offing are ones that have been in planning for years or were previously put on hold, but to hear the words 'major project', 'high-rise' and 'commercial new build' are all encouraging to me and we're starting to see them come out of the ground.
Other emerging markets or companies that are bucking the trend appear to be the smaller fit-out contractors. Generally new start ups concentrating on projects up to £1million in value, many of which are run by ex-company directors from larger more corporate entities that have gone it alone and are doing very nicely out of smaller commercial or retail clients.
We've also seen trends throughout the recession from a labour force perspective. Many companies in the UK, including the UK's top one hundred contractors and consultancies alike ceased their graduate programs, only recently reopening them.
2012 saw an increase in demand for front end personnel, Bid Managers, Estimators and Marketeers, so what next? Will we start to see an increase in demand for more operational roles, site engineers, site managers, project managers, only then will we know if we are truly on the road to recovery.
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