GUEST COLUMN:
Jon Hill
Owner
Cymru Cash Buyers
The city of Swansea has 2,014 empty homes, according to Welsh Government's own figures for 2026-27. Not second homes, not holiday lets, empty houses, sitting there, in a city where people are on housing waiting lists.
And across Wales the number is 38,058, with 23,033 of those have been empty for more than six months. The number of properties now paying an empty homes council tax premium has almost doubled since 2022, from 6,718 to 12,357.
Councils are taxing the problem harder than they ever have, and the problem is still growing.
I buy these houses for a living, so I want to be straightforward about my position before I make an argument. I own a company that purchases empty and neglected property, at a discount, for cash. I benefit from this situation. I still think it's a bad one, and I think it's fixable.
The picture people have of an empty home is a landlord sitting on an asset. That is not who I deal with. I deal with, for example, a woman in her sixties who inherited her mother's house four years ago, got a survey back saying it needs a roof, rewiring and a damp course, and cannot find £45,000.
I deal with families stuck in probate for three years while a house rots. I deal with people who moved into care and whose property nobody had the authority to sell.
None of them wanted an empty house. They ended up with one because the cost of making it habitable was higher than they could reach, and the longer it sat, the higher that cost got.
Here is what happens next. That house cannot be bought with a mortgage. No mainstream lender will advance on a property with no working kitchen or bathroom, or with structural movement, fire damage, serious damp or knotweed. The valuation comes back unmortgageable and the buyer's application dies.
So, the only people who can buy it are people with cash. That's me. That's the auction room. It is emphatically not the first-time buyer who would love a three-bed terrace in Swansea at forty grand under market value and has every intention of living in it.
Welsh Government has a scheme for exactly this. The National Empty Homes Grant offers up to £25,000 to make an empty property safe and energy efficient. It's a good scheme. It is genuinely open to first-time buyers — not just existing owners — and it asks for a 15% contribution and a commitment to live in the property as your main home for five years. That last condition is the right one; it aims the money at people who need somewhere to live rather than at investors.
But there's a catch that undoes most of it. To apply, you must already own the property, or be in the process of buying it.
Read that again alongside the paragraph above. You can only get the grant once you've bought the house. You can't buy the house without a mortgage.
You can't get a mortgage until the house is renovated. The grant that would pay for the renovation requires you to have bought the house.
For anyone without cash, that circle doesn't open. The support is aimed at the renovation when the barrier is the purchase.
What would actually shift it?
Three changes, none of them expensive relative to what empty property already costs Wales in lost housing and enforcement.
Acquisition finance alongside the grant. A bridging facility from Welsh Government or local authorities, secured on the property, repayable when the works complete and the buyer refinances onto a normal mortgage.
The risk is modest — it's lending against a house that will be worth substantially more at the end of the process — and it is the single change that would let an ordinary buyer compete with a cash trader.
Eligibility confirmed before purchase. Let a buyer get a decision in principle on the grant before they commit. At the moment you're asking people to buy an uninhabitable house in the hope that funding follows.
Tell first-time buyers the scheme exists. In four years of buying empty property I have never once had a vendor mention it, and almost no first-time buyer I've spoken to knows it applies to them.
In Carmarthenshire, for example, applications close on September, 30, 2026. Most of the people it was designed for will not find out in time.
It would be easy to write this and carry on buying at the same discount. So, where we can, we'll offer renovated and part-renovated properties to local first-time buyers before they go to the open market. That won't move a national number and I'm not pretending it will. It's just the bit that's within my control.
There will always be houses that are genuinely beyond a first-time buyer — the ones needing structural work, full rewires, a new roof. That's the work I want to be doing. What I don't think anyone should want is a market where a young couple in Swansea, for example, are locked out of two thousand houses purely because the finance stops at the wrong end of the process.
The homes are already there. We've counted them. We've taxed them. We just haven't given anyone a way to buy them.
Jon Hill is the owner of Cymru Cash Buyers, which purchases empty and neglected property across south and west Wales.
