HMO’s - A LOW-CARBON SOLUTION
…Standing opposite a large Georgian or Victorian building you’d be forgiven for thinking they are not a low carbon solution to the UK’s housing supply. We think they can be.
Buildings created before 1950 are universally cold, draughty and inefficient. They were heated by then relatively inexpensive carbon dense fuels such as coal and firewood. They didn’t require hot water in most aspects of the house and heating was often taken care of with open fires in rooms.
The conversation these days around housing and zero carbon focuses on building efficient new homes, often on virgin sites, using renewable materials and adding renewable sources of energy and heat production. This is critical and should be the direction in which modern homes are built.
But there is another important part of the conversation…
Traditional housing is extremely robust and can undergo all manner of energy efficient alterations. Both passive such as insulation and active such as efficient electrical installations and heating systems. The sector most primed for this we believe are HMO’s. Buildings commonly used as HMO’s are typically large and perform poorly in terms of energy consumption and emissions.
Landlords and operators in the HMO industry are naturally incentivised to make their buildings as efficient as possible because they foot the bill for energy consumption. Making these buildings energy efficient not only lowers the operational cost, but it reduces carbon impacts from lost heat AND makes them more attractive, comfortable homes for tenants.
HMO’s need to be heavily modified to function as a stable and attractive asset. Whilst a lot of this work is modifying a property to allow for licensing standards to be met and more bath/shower rooms, it logically follows that as part of this modification work a lot of focus should be put on increasing thermal and systems efficiency.
As owners and operators in this industry we strongly believe that offering effective and efficient HMO’s have a 4-fold benefit.
It re-uses existing, hard-to-deal-with housing supply. These buildings are existing stores of inert carbon. The majority of the polluting work was done hundreds of years ago when they were built. Repurposing them and keeping their existing shell and structure will often produce many times less carbon than knocking them down and creating new buildings or developing virgin land.
It takes previously under-performing, polluting buildings out of commission. Instead, making them more thermally and carbon efficient assets.
It increases the population density within a single building envelope which means marginally lower carbon emissions per capita. In short, more bodies are sharing, a boiler, a heating system, washing facilities, kitchen appliances etc…
Increasing the population density in a building by better allocating its space and creating an HMO eases upstream pressures such as demand for new housing supply from virgin land and demand pressure for flats. All things being equal this should ease pressure on rental prices and house prices.
It’s all too common to take a binary stand point on carbon emissions and net zero, saying homes are arbitrarily good or bad performers. In practice it’s a different story, a key piece of the housing puzzle is optimising existing stock and allocating space more effectively by offering HMO’s.
