The specialist insurance broker Assetsure has noticed a large increase in the number of prospective clients seeking building registered second home owners. In it’s recent report it found the number of second home owners has increased by as much as 2,000 per cent in rural hotspots in just five years.
Simon Nunn, Head of South for the National Housing Federation said: If families and young people are priced out of their local villages community life suffers, with village shops, schools and pubs closing in alarming numbers as a result. Unless we build more affordable homes for local people, they will continue to be priced out of rural areas, and the countryside will increasingly become a place for the well off to enjoy at weekends.”
Locals have expressed resentment at wealthy second home owners buying up properties and putting them out of reach of locals. In 2009 Second home owners were told to ‘go home” in a series of graffiti attacks at a development in Worth Matravers in Dorset. The region’s traditionally low average wages make high house prices even harder to bear.
