As hundreds more apartments go up in Central Milton Keynes, many existing ones have gone unsold for up to TWO YEARS

Over the past few years there have been numerous projects launched by developers to build apartments at CMK for either private rent or sale.

Some have involved converting former office buildings to housing, while others are ‘filling in’ patches of unused land.

MK Council figure show 730 new apartments have been completed since 2018, plus 261 young people’s flats at the new YMCA building. But well over 1,000 more are in the pipeline and have either been granted planning permission or agreed under permitted development rights.

Some of the buildings are a ‘modest’ two or three storeys tall but others, such as the recently completed 294 apartment scheme in Avebury Boulevard’s Aubrey Place, tower above the skyline at 17 storeys.

King of the high rise will be the ‘MK Gateway’ development – 288 apartments to be built in one massive 27-storey block and four other four-storey buildings at Saxon Court, the city’s former Covid vaccination centre.

The latter two developments are classified as build to rent, but many others are built solely for sale or for a mixture of sale and rent.

The Citizen this week looked at how popular these flats are proving on the property market and how long they are taking to sell. We discovered at least a dozen ‘luxury’ apartments, all in flagship city centre developments and boasting all mod cons, had been on the market for more than a year.

Many were situated in The Hub and several had been advertised unsuccessfully for two years.

Rightmove shows the “oldest listed” CMK property to be a fourth floor, two bedroom apartment in Opal House, which is part of the Vizion development at The Hub. Priced at £277,750, it has been listed since January 12 2020 – two years and four months ago.

It boasts a rooftop garden, entrance hall, kitchen fully fitted with integrated appliances, open plan living/dining space with French doors leading onto a private balcony, master bedroom with an en-suite, one further bedroom and a main family bathroom. The property offers allocated underground parking for one car.

Next most unsold apartment is in South Row, in The Moonstone House. On the fourth floor and with one bedroom, it is priced at £210,000 with a tenant in situ and was first listed for sale in March 2020.

Another two bedroom Vizion flat, in Merrivale Mews, has been listed for exactly two years and is priced at £270,000, while a third in neighbouring Ruby House has been on the market, also for £270,000, for one year and nine months as it awaits “investment buyers only”.

At nearby Carnegie House, a two bed up for £245,000 has been on the market for two years.

A “stunning” three bedroom apartment in South Fifth Street, also part of the Vizion development, was put on the market for investors only in January 2021. The sitting tenants were in place until January 2022 – but today it is still on the market for £335,000.

One issue that could delay sales on certain flats in CMK’s high rise blocks is cladding. Since the Grenfell tower block tragey in 2017, fire safety standards for cladding have tightened considerably. As a result, many high rise blocks in MK were been declared unsafe and some are awaiting or undergoing costly remedial works.

Meanwhile the rest of the housing market in Milton Keynes seems bouyant, with prices increasing by more than average last year, figures show.

The average Milton Keynes house price is around £289,395, which is a 1.7% increase since October last year. Some areas are more popular than others, with Bletchley Park seeing 54% more properties sold in 2021 than in 2020, followed by Newport Pagnell South, which saw a 51% increase.

Meanwhile, the number of homes sold in Milton Keynes rose from 3,418 in 2020 to 4,099 last year.

See our gallery of photos of the apartments that have been on the market for the longest.