ABSTRACT
The twentieth century has seen an immense growth in this type of development in Britain. Home ownership, restricted to the very rich until the early years of the century, had become by the 1990s the tenure form of about 70 per cent of the population. The rapid expansion of owner occupancy in twentieth-century Britain has taken place in an increasingly pervasive pro-ownership climate. Before 1914, when nearly all housing was produced for renting, the rate of output of new housing tended to be related to the apparent prospects for a profitable rate of return, in other words to trends in rent levels. The recent history, and especially the length and depth of the house-building recession, presents a number of vexing problems for the analyst as well as for others. Some were sold directly on the site and some via one of the estate agents contacted earlier in the development process.
