People living in a Bristol street have reacted with shock after a property developer began work to convert a two-up-two-down terraced house into a seven bedroom HMO. One local councillor described the House in Multiple Occupation plan for the small house in Bedminster as ‘appalling’ and vowed to ‘call-in’ the plan for further scrutiny.
Work on a loft conversion on the late Victorian terraced home in Ruby Street has already begun, and the man behind the project has angered local residents by posting pictures of the work on his Instagram account. Nottingham-based property developer Tolu Koya told his Insta followers that ‘many neighbourly issues can be sorted… and we did’.
While the physical work to convert the loft into bedrooms is perfectly legal, Mr Koya needs planning permission to change the use of the two-up-two-down house into an HMO. That still has to go through the planning process, and no decision on it has yet been made. And the application, which took four months to be validated by the city council’s planning department, has already attracted more than 30 objections from local residents in less than a week.
