This is interesting and they make some good observations but I can't help but think the deck was stacked against them because they are trying to come up with a technical/business solution to what is fundamentally a political problem.

If a government truly wanted to fix a housing "crisis", wouldn't a ban on any type of corporate entity from buying single-family homes be an efficient solution? E.g., LLC's can no longer purchase single-family homes. Only real, live human individuals can purchase single-family homes. They could also try to implement some type of ban on any single individual person from purchasing more than 1 (or choose a number) single-family home.

When I coach startup founders, I walk them through a very simple 4 step process when we meet:

1. What have you learnt since we last met and how has that altered your priors?

2. What do you now believe is the most important problem you should be solving?

3. What's currently blocking you from solving that problem?

4. How do we overcome those blocks?

Crucial to this process is that Q1 is not what have you done, it's what have you learnt. I do not give a shit about anything you've done if it's not in the service of learning.

I also run a retro every 3 months with founders where we ask the following questions:

1. What would you want to tell yourself 3/6/12 months ago (essentially, all the lessons learnt in italics) to save the maximum amount of pain?

2. When did you learn each specific thing?

3. When was the earliest you could have learnt that thing?

4. What changes can we make going forward to minimize that delta?

Extremely simple things but extraordinarily powerful when applied consistently over a long enough span of time.

> Housing in Britain is expensive because getting planning permission is difficult.

It's true that planning departments are very expensive, don't do much positively, and still seem to allow awful-looking things to be built, and I'd probably happily do away with them, but the fundamental driver is the incredible onboarding of people from overseas for years that crushes the combination of the existing population and the new people into a number of dwellings that isn't that dissimilar to the previous year.

You can't take on a net number of people each year that would require a new city the size of Nottingham to be built to accommodate, and say "well, it's all the planning process' fault."

Thanks for writing this!

> Housing in Britain is expensive because getting planning permission is difficult.

Isn't the real problem that supply is artificially constrained because house prices and the economy are interlinked in a way in a special way in the UK economy, such that the majority of home owners don't want it changed (because more supply == downward pricing pressure)

I think the only entity that could meaningfully change this situation is government, and well it's easier to not upset your donors.

Edit: To be fair to the author, they do mention artificial supply constraints but I think my point stands - it is there by design, too much inertia forcing it to be that way that won't be changed by streamlining the bureaucratic elements