The 32nd annual general meeting of shareholders in the above company was held at the Company's offices, No.2 Jinkee Road, on Wednesday morning. Mr. E. C. Pearce presided, and was supported by Messrs. H. E. Arnhold, C. G. Mackie and F. C. Butcher (Directors) and Mr. P. Peebles (Manager).
In the courses of his speech, the Chairman said:—
Gentlemen,—The Report and Accounts have been in your hands for some days, and I propose, with your permission, to take them as read. The past year has had one outstanding feature, viz., a great scarcity of houses and offices. The shortage of houses is still very marked, but it would seem that the demand for offices, though still good, is not nearly so pressing as it was earlier in the year. The completion of the many large office buildings at preseat under construction should still further relieve the situation. To meet the small house shortage we are carrying into effect the scheme outlined in my speech last year, that is to say, some 40 houses let at reasonable rents are in course of construction on our Kinnear Road property. Of these houses 20 will be let to local firms on 25 year leases, and the remainder are all let to individual tenants on shorter leases. Other than this we have built during the year only five houses—one on our Great Western Road Estate and four on Dixwell Road. The shortage of money and the difficulty of placing debentures on the market at remunerative rates, to which I referred last year, together with the increasing cost of building material, has made extensive development schemes very unattractive.
The whole position relative to housing is very difficult, and is one to which your Directors and staff of the Company have given a great deal of thought during the past two years. I am sorry to have to admit that we see no very satisfactory solution to the difficulty. The housing problem, as you are aware, is acute generally throughout the world. In England the impossibility of building small houses at economic rents has become so apparent that the Government has had to step in and subsidize building schemes. Such help as that is, of course, out of the question here and we are left to tackle a problem which so far as we can see can have
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.