Today's session focussed on a real wicked problem:

“Why does it costs us what it does to build new homes and what can we do about this?”

To explore this we are helping our colleague Alex Dixon look at the problem from three perspectives:

What type of accommodation do we build and what do customers want?
What is the affordable rent going forward that customers can pay and what can we build for this?
What are our construction costs and how could we reduce them by 50%?

As Paul Taylor writes in Inside Housing

“When I started my career in housing, I was letting new build two and three-bed properties to young families – many would have all the rent covered by benefit. The world has changed for those people, and like it or not our product range has to change with it.”

How do we design a product range for an uncertain and volatile world?

These are some of the questions we'll be exploring:

Why are we so focussed on creating properties that last 100 years? Will 25, 15 or even 5 do?
What costs can be squeezed out? We’ll do our own sums but Alistair Parvin outline the opportunities in a great piece.
How do we reverse the default to traditional build - what are the new partnerships we could explore?
If our product range was a series of 3D printed customisable shells what would this look like?

You'll be able to keep up with the concept as it develops!