London’s new housing zones are going to provide new homes for tens of thousands of Londoners and provide billions of pounds of development funds. We thought we’d have a look at what you need to know.

Basically if you see a substantial piece of brownfield land in and around the capital there’s a good chance of it becoming a development target for the new housing zones as part of Boris Johnson’s plans to take under-utilised brownfield land and create swathes of housing.

The new housing zones are hoping to create something like 50,000 new homes in areas throughout London over a 10 year period starting in 2015. London Borough Councils have until the end of September this year to bid for housing zone status.

The key to the new housing zones is the local councils being empowered to drive housing in partnership with the private sector, to do this they need to submit plans to build at least 1,000 homes in order to achieve a slice of the £400m that’s on offer on a 50:50 basis from the GLA (at least half of which will be available in a loan).

The front runners to date are Enfield, Ealing, Harringey, Tower Hamlets and Wandsworth with these boroughs set to bring in billions of pounds worth of development.

It’s likely that Meridian Water in Enfield is going to bring some big opportunities for contractors to get involved in the coming months,

As we've already seen with the recent announcement by L&G Property this should offer a new route to the residential construction for big institutional investors as they favour large scale development projects.

As with anything around London, good transportation is crucial and the GLA will be factoring in the location of the development site compared to local transportation infrastructure plus any planned infrastructure upgrades.

If you're a contractor looking to get a piece of the action, it’s imperative that you now keep your ear to the ground and start working that network to see who’s doing what and when because it’s likely this will start to move at quite a pace, especially as the local councils will be able to operate in a streamlined planning environment.