16 billion in property space lost to junk in West Midlands

734,000 homes in the West Midlands are losing the space of an entire room to junk, according to new research from Clearabee, the on-demand rubbish removal company. A third of households (32 per cent) in the West Midlands admit to hoarding sufficient useless and discarded items in their home to cover an area of 8m2 or more, enough to fill a small single bedroom.

Clearabee’s survey, which was conducted by research consultancy Populus, discovered that the average home in the West Midlands contains enough old or useless clothes, video tapes, CDs, gadgets, furniture, exercise equipment and other assorted junk to cover 4.1m2, five per cent of the floor space in a modern three bedroom house.

This space is worth more than £7,000 at current market values. Across 2.3 million households in the region, £16.3 billion worth of property space is potentially wasted to household junk. If it was all gathered together, it would cover a total area of 4.1 square miles.

Across the UK, the average home has enough junk to cover 4.8m2 of floor space. With house prices currently at £2,054 a square metre, the value of space wasted storing junk in the average UK home is £9,797. In total, UK residents are wasting £259 billion worth of space storing junk in their homes.