Affordable Housing

Professor Stanimira Milcheva is the Director of the Affordable Housing Hub and Professor in Real Estate Finance at UCL. Her background is in finance and economics looking at real asset markets and asset pricing. Stani’s aim is to work alongside strategic stakeholders to provide transparency on the market for affordable housing. She has set up the Shared Ownership Data Initiative to increase wider public understanding for shared ownership as well as provide understanding around shared ownership as a hybrid housing tenure. 

Stani has published over 20 peer-reviewed papers in leading field academic journals such as the Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Banking and Finance, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Energy Economics.  She is the recipient of best paper awards (RICS, Homer Hoyt Institute, Cushman and Wakefield) and funding awards (Real Estate Research Institute, University of Reading Research Endowment Trust Fund). 

Stani has worked on various funded research and advisory projects for government (Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities) local government and non-profit providers as well as key stakeholder organisations (CASE, G15, National Housing Federation, Shelter, Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, European Public Real Estate Association, etc.). 

Send Stani an email

Richard is a specialist in macro and real estate economics. He joined CBRE in 2014 as Executive Director and Global Chief Economist. Prior to taking up his position with CBRE, Richard was a Director of Research for the Grosvenor Group an international business with circa $10bn of capital under management in real estate. He was also a non-Executive Director of Grosvenor Fund Management where he was involved in fund strategy, risk analysis and capital raising. Richard is the author of two books and numerous academic and industry papers. In 2012 he published ‘Real Estate and Globalisation’ (Wiley Blackwell, Oxford), which explains the impact on real estate markets of the rise of emerging markets such as China and Brazil. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Reading where he taught, in the Departments of Economics and Land Management, between the years of 1987 and 1998.  

Prof. Yolande Barnes has been examining and analysing real estate markets since 1986. As Director of World Research at Savills, Yolande provided evidence-based advice to clients and thought-leadership in real estate. She set up and ran the UK residential research department, pioneering and developing new techniques for measuring place potential, land values and sustainable urbanism.

In 2012, she applied these techniques globally and in 2014 took on all sectors worldwide, focusing on cities. She is an advisor to a variety of different enterprises and organisations. She writes regularly for research publications, national and international newspapers on a variety of property-related topics, and regularly appears on television and radio. Send Yolande an email.  

Pete is the L&G Group social impact and investment director and was heading the Public Sector Partnerships for LGIM Real Assets prior to that. After an erstwhile life as a Youth Worker, Pete joined Legal & General in 2007, launching a new generation of property funds focussed on liability matching and Defined Contributions pension schemes, and L&G’s joint venture with PGGM, which total over £5bn.  In 2015, Pete moved to lead L&G’s investments with the Public Sector - including the Cabinet Office, Local Authorities, NHS, Housing Associations and Universities - which now total over £4.5bn. 

Pete holds an MA from Brasenose College, Oxford in Computation, the IMC, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and Honorary Professor at UCL.

Pete is heavily involved in local community projects in Harlesden, west London and a Trustee of the Young Foundation, which works to create a more equal and just society through social innovation. 

Paul is CEO of Optivo, one of the UK’s leading housing associations. Paul is a former chair of G15, representing London’s largest housing associations and a former member of the Homes for Londoners Board. Paul is particularly interested in the funding and delivery of affordable housing and the role of resident engagement in the governance and management of social landlords. 

Paul is an Honorary Professor at the UCL Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction and a member of the RICS Housing Supply Group. He is an Academician of the Academy of Urbanism and a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, the Chartered Institute of Building and the Chartered Institute of Housing. 

Yunlong Huang has a background in financial modeling, advanced statistics and civil engineering, specialising in applied predictive modeling. His research interests lies in the intersection of data science, machine learning and housing. He is developing a system to collect research data and use specialised computational algorithms to combine with multi-source data. This will result in one of the biggest databases of UK housing market studies. Yunlong utilises modern statistical and machine learning methods, industry grade workflow and best practices while developing quantitative academic research methods. Send Yunlong an email.
 

Hang Lai has experience of working at real estate company as research analyst prior to his academic journey. Now, Hang’s research area lies in the real estate/housing economics and finance and adopt micro level data to do empirical research. Housing affordability is an important topic in his research area and he has done an economics analysis on affordable housing policy — Right to Buy.

Hang’s current research explores the long run discount rate using repeat sales housing in England and Wales to estimate the term structure of discount rate. This can show how households evaluate future cash flows at present value and it is helpful for policy appraisal and investment portfolio decision. Send Hang an email.

In June 2019, the second BSSC Doctoral Conference took place, organised by PhD students Yunlong Huang and Thomas Weston. The theme this year was affordable housing and big data. With presentations from both academics and PhD students, a wide variety of topics related to housing and machine learning were covered, exploring areas such as affordable housing, migration and demography, and machine learning methodologies. 

Download the presentations:

• Understanding London’s Urban Metabolism: Baseline setting, reproducibility - Boyana (Bonnie) Buyuklieva
• Strategic facility and asset management - machine learning based methods - Zigeng Fang
• Is affordable housing, about housing? - Sepehr Zhand
• Big data, machine learning, and econometrics: applications to real estate
• The Use of Agent-Based Modelling in Modelling Migration - Lois Liao

On 22 June 2018, The Bartlett School of Construction and Project Management hosted a one day symposium - The Case of Affordable Housing: Private Sector Investment in Social Infrastructure - exploring the role of private investment in housing affordability.

The symposium brought together leading academic researchers in public policy, urban planning, real estate and economics, joining representatives from local authorities and government and industry financers to explore alternative solutions to the housing affordability crisis faced by the UK and the role of private sector investment. 

Read our reflections on the symposium and watch films of the sessions.

On 12 September, The Bartlett School of Construction and Project Management held a one day international conference - The Case of Affordable Housing: a global perspective on financing and institutional ownership. 

The conference brought together academics and a wide range of industry stakeholders to explore global case studies focused on new tools and models for financing affordable housing, working towards viable solutions for the UK and beyond.

Read our reflections on the conference, watch films of the sessions and download the papers and presentation slides. 

As part of a collaborative project between University College London (UCL) and KTH Stockholm, The Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction (BSSC) hosted two hybrid virtual conferences on the pertinent topic of Net Zero and Affordable Housing. 

The first event “Towards Net Zero Affordable Housing – The Swedish Perspective” was held on Monday 14th June and was chaired by Dr Bertram Steininger (KTH). The second event “Towards Net Zero Affordable Housing – The UK Perspective” was held on Wednesday 23rd June and was chaired by Dr Stanimira Milcheva (UCL).  

The symposiums provided a platform to discuss the topic with prominent experts from academia and industry and aimed to uncover the data needs which can help us understand feasible pathways to achieving net zero in housing. 

Read our reflections on the symposium and watch recordings of the events.