Housing markets must change, warns RICS

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) has called for a dramatic change in the way housing markets operate to enable the 21 million new housing units needed annually in the developing world to be delivered.

An RICS report claims that heavy-handed government intervention in housing markets has been a major contributor to the scale of the housing crisis that the world is currently facing, while housing policies in developed countries do not offer a suitable model for other countries to follow.

Report author, Professor Michael Ball of the University of Reading, said: "Government intervention has been a hallmark of housing policy around the world for much of the post 1945 period, but the results have often been poor.

"Market processes are generally the best way to deal with housing problems. Policies need to build up the institutional structures of markets, rather than undermine them, as they have tended to do in the past."

'Improving Housing Markets' suggests that private rented housing throughout the world has been driven off the market by over regulation and rent controls.

And any attempts by developing countries to copy European social housing policies have collapsed because such countries lack the resources to make them work.