Real Estate Investing Information Blog

A housing estate is a reason built area of residential development, typically part of a larger suburb of a town or city in a developed nation. It is a general form of residential area in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and is equally popular in Europe. It is less important in countries with lower population densities, such as the United States and Australia. In distinction to high density housing, such as tower blocks, town housing or the older-style rows of terraced houses linked with the industrial revolution, housing estates typically feature detached or semi-detached houses with small plots of land around them forming gardens. Very frequently, an estate will be built by a single contractor, with only a few styles of house design, so they tend to be very consistent in appearance. This phenomenon is less common in Australia and the US, where estates often feature individual houses all built to a unique design selected by the initial occupier.

Housing estates are the common form of residential design used in new towns, where estates are designed as an autonomous suburb, centered on a small commercial centre. Such estates are typically designed to minimize through-traffic flows, and to provide recreational space in the form of parks and greens.

In the UK, housing estates have become common since World War II, as a more affluent population demanded larger and additional widely spaced houses coupled with the increase of car usage for which terraced streets were unsuitable. Housing estates were produced by each one local corporation or by private developers. The former tended to be a means of producing public housing most important to estates full of council houses and therefore known as "council estates". In the UK the post war New towns were constructed en masse from housing estates pretty than as organic growth from a population centre.

In Hong Kong public housing estates are built to domicile the booming population from the 1950s to 70s, and to provide reasonable homes for those on low incomes. Rents are cheaper than normal housing, and are heavily subsidized, financed by financial activities such as rents and charges composed from car parks and shops within or near the estates. They are typically high-rise, from 7-storey types in the 1950s to over 40-storey types recently. They are typically located in the remote or less accessible parts of the territory, but urban expansion has put a number of them in the heart of the urban area. Home rights Scheme flats, unlike the public housing estates, are sold to the owners at inexpensive prices. There is also some tower blocks development with 20 to over 100 20-to-70-storey blocks which are confidentially developed and owned.