Despite record house prices and record results, some £5bn has been wiped off the value of the UK’s listed housebuilders this year.
Cat Rutter Pooley, opining in the FT, said the damage had been caused by housing secretary Michael Gove’s plans to raise £4bn from the sector to deal with the cladding crisis.
However, not all the £5bn that developers have shed since relations between government and industry broke down is due to cladding remediation costs. UBS analysts estimate housebuilder shares have lost roughly £1.9bn more in value than can be explained by wider market moves. Until shares improved over the past week, that figures was closer to £2.9bn.
