It's tempting to assume developers build flats because they're greedy or lazy. The reality is more specific: on most urban sites, the maths, the land type and the planning rules all point to apartments. On other sites, houses still win. Here's how that decision actually gets made.
The short answer
Developers don't have a blanket policy of 'flats over houses'. They appraise each site and build whatever generates the most value within what the land and planning permit. On a costly, tightly-constrained city plot, that's almost always apartments.
Expensive land only works if you spread its cost across enough homes. Apartments stack many saleable units — and much more floor area — onto a single plot, so the land cost per home falls and the scheme becomes viable. On a small city site, a terrace of houses simply can't carry the land price the way a block of flats can.
Most new urban development is on brownfield plots — former industrial land hemmed in by roads and railways. Those shapes and locations suit apartments. Larger greenfield sites on a town's edge, by contrast, are where estates of family houses get built.
Where local plans set high-density targets — typically near stations and city centres — apartments are the way to hit them. The same policies that drive the wider apartment boom apply at the level of the individual site.
Family houses with gardens remain scarce and sought-after precisely because they aren't mass-produced on urban plots — think canal-side houses like those at Port Loop. For buyers and buy-to-let investors, that scarcity can mean houses hold pricing power that mass-produced flats don't.
On expensive, constrained city sites, apartments spread the land cost across more homes and are what planning density rules reward. Houses are built where land is cheaper and larger — typically greenfield edges of towns.
Per acre of expensive urban land, usually yes, because they deliver far more saleable floor space. On cheaper, larger sites houses can be the better return.
Near stations and in city centres, local plans often set high-density targets that effectively favour apartments. Elsewhere, houses remain the norm.
Not automatically, but family houses with gardens are scarcer in cities and can hold pricing power better than mass-produced flats. It depends on the local market — our Property Intelligence research looks at this scheme by scheme.