A housing association is offering for sale a house in 19 Bassein Park Road (currently split into three flats) in Shepherd’s Bush for sale at auction. The guide price is at £1.2 million plus.
We are not told the condition the property is in or the name of the housing association.
What is obvious is that £1.2 million is a lot of money. Some will attack the housing association for selling the property claiming that it means the homes (with a total of five bedrooms) will be “lost”. That is the position of the Labour-run council.
But if the housing association can use those funds to provide more replacement housing then that would benefit some of those in temporary accommodation – often overcrowded.
Some of these auction sales go for even higher prices – I wrote earlier about one in Shepherd’s Bush Road for £2 million.
Housing associations are taking a practical approach to maximise their resources to do as much as possible to ease housing pressures. The council’s policy – refusing to sell regardless of the value – is ideologically driven and does the homeless no favours at all.
Hammersmith and Fulham Forum 
I have to agree Harry, It makes perfect sense for Social Housing owners to sell expensive properties and then use the proceeds to build more affordable units.
It is not only the matter of whether the capital tied up in properties like this can be better and more efficiently deployed. Even if they have been the subject of ‘Decent Homes’ type work, they will still be horribly expensive to keep warm, the result of single glazed windows, draughty suspended timber floors and solid brick walls. In the days of cheap energy, and before we knew about climate change that was manageable; you just left the central heating on all day and put an electric heater in every room. Now things are serious and we have to radically upgrade the quality of our housing stock. This can only take place during the full modernisation/refurbishment program that typically follows a sale like this (indeed it can be made a condition of sale). The ex-Housing Association property opposite me was so draughty and damp it had literally made one of its occupants ill. It has now been virtually rebuilt inside its brickwork skin, with gargantuan amounts of insulation, a solid concrete subfloor and new, high efficiency double glazing. This needs to happen, eventually, to every Victorian property in Hammersmith and Fulham.