I’ve always felt ambivalent about “look backs” but a decade is a decent length of time to reflect on what’s changed in major areas such as housing.

Context matters. 2010 brought a general election that ended Labour’s 13-year reign. The fall-out of the 2007-8 global financial crash was still all too evident; lending had been tightened and, outside London, housebuilding had almost ground to a halt and nothing was selling. The Cameron-led, coalition government set out plans to re-boot the housing market in a climate of localism, liberalisation and austerity while promising to be the “greenest government ever”.

Against that backdrop, it would be fair to characterise the 2010s as a decade of housing recovery, but of course it’s more complicated than that. Fresh challenges, opportunities and errors of judgment crop up all the time. Here is my list of 13 things that changed, for better or worse:

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