FOCUS: Why are there 4,000 empty homes in Jersey?

Wednesday 31 August 2022

New figures have shed light on the reasons why more than 4,000 properties have no one living in them in Jersey.

While islanders did not have to share a reason for owning an empty home when they completed the Census last year, information was provided on just under half of empty properties.

While Statistics Jersey shared the number of vacant dwellings when it released the full results of the Census earlier this year, it has only shared the reasons provided for the first time today.

The breakdown

On Census Day…

• 1,062 homes were being built or renovated;

• 235 were second or holiday homes;

• 177 were “between tenants";

• 90 were empty because their main occupier had died;

• 84 were unoccupied staff accommodation;

• 80 were empty because their main occupier had moved into a care home;

• 66 were for sale; and,

• in the case of 51 properties, the owners were away long-term.

How do you decide if a property is officially "empty"?

Properties were classed as vacant if they were not occupied on census day. However, buildings whose usual occupiers were temporarily out of the island (for less than 12 months) and those that were derelict were not counted.

A building was classed as “derelict” where there were “no signs that it was undergoing renovation or conversion work and the roof was partly or completely missing or the floors, staircases or entrance doors were missing.”

How were vacant properties tracked down?

Statistics Jersey, who carried out the Census, explained that vacant private dwellings were identified in several different ways - for example, by:

• “householders phoning or emailing the census helpline to notify that a dwelling was vacant on Census Day;
• paper census forms posted back to the Census Office indicating a vacant property;
• census field staff visiting addresses that had not returned a census form (field staff would have assessed whether a dwelling was vacant based on visual inspection or, sometimes, from information provided by neighbours, landlords, etc).”

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