Size is shrinking; prices are rising

Are we giving our residents in Dubai, Paris, Manhattan or London the homes they deserve? More importantly, are we giving them the space they need to live?

I ask these questions because the newly-elected mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has told the United Kingdom capital's house builders to construct larger apartments and houses than they have built in recent years. He says he wants to "re-establish the space standards set by Sir Parker Morris".

This refers to a 47-year-old guideline set out by a UK civil servant, Parker Morris, which suggested that a two-person home would require 490 square feet of space, while a three-person home would require 623 sq ft. A two-storey home for four people should be at least 792 sq ft.

Yet a survey in April this year in the UK capital by London Residential Research, a property consultancy, suggested that typical private homes now being built were between 35 per cent and 50 per cent smaller than the Parker Morris standards recommend.

My own research confirms the trend is not confined to London but has spread across the UK.

I contacted the sales offices of 20 schemes built by downturn-lashed Barratt Homes across England. I found that the significant majority of one-bedroom flats were five per cent to 15 per cent smaller than 495 sq ft.

Meanwhile, there is the "studio flat" favoured by Barratt and many other developers, where sizes routinely go as low as 360 sq ft, or under 75 per cent of the recommended minimum for two occupants four decades ago.

This trend may be worse in the UK than many other countries because historically many estate agents and developers have been reluctant to specify square-footage, especially for apartments and conversions of older, larger houses. Concentrating on rooms, not floor space, means few buyers know that a typical new-build home today is actually far smaller than an average one built back in, say, 1920.

And although house sizes in modern homes have not changed in the past 20 years, they typically have 20 per cent more rooms today as home offices and en-suites have proliferated, while bedrooms have reduced in size. So while floor space has fallen dramatically, agents and developers alike claim to be building homes with more rooms.

Developers are not doing their customers a service by trying to disguise the shrinking size of properties by creating yet more, ever smaller rooms.

Some property professionals say a switch to pricing by floor space would allow buyers at all levels of the market to see beyond the sophisticated marketing by builders of new homes.

"We allow developers to get away with liberties," says Joe Martin of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. "They never try to enlarge a property to give us more space to live - they just want to squeeze more rooms in. As a result, we are literally selling ourselves short of living space as a society," he says.

Research by the estate agent Knight Frank for this article revealed that other cities are faring better. Typical new two-bedroom apartments in Paris are 560 square feet, or 15 per cent larger than recommended by Parker Morris. In Berlin, the typical property is 624 sq ft, while in Sydney the average is a vast 1,075.

Some of this vast disparity can be explained by differences in modernity and land-space. A new city, with elbow room to expand, will have few excuses not building homes that are spacious.

An old city, unable to expand except through infill or towers, has more justification for building small.

But Paris and Berlin are neither newer nor more spacious than London, yet still manage to build larger homes.

When this is taken into account, it is hard to come to any conclusion other than the one which says UK buyers are being ripped off. That feeling is the last thing that a buyer-starved industry like the UK's residential property market needs right now. Developers are heavily indebted and urgently need cash flow, yet the product they make is not only expensive but is small and, in many cases, unappealling. Yet there may be a worldwide lesson from all this.

The lesson is that new emerging residential markets like those of the Middle and Far East, eastern Europe and Asia must not repeat the errors seen elsewhere.

Treat your customers with respect and make homes worth living in, and they will respect you in return. Treat them as mere consumers of a product where quality takes second place, and they will judge you harshly.

Or to put it another way, learn from the mistakes of the UK developers.