Sarah Payne

I work in the Department of Town and Regional Planning, University of Sheffield. I teach and research in the areas of planning and property development and my administrative tasks focus on enhancing the employability of our students and managing & developing our placement programme.

Prior to working in academia, I spent two years working as a Land Buyer for a volume housebuilder and a further two years working as a Property Consultant.

My research interests focus on behavioural understandings of real estate development processes and specifically the interaction between public policy and private sector behaviour in land and housing market activity. I'm particularly interested in the interdisciplinary issues of environmental performance and business strategy and also in broader debates concerning urban growth and carbon regulation. My work is conceptually underpinned by the emerging state-market relations and institutional analysis literature in British property research.

My current research work focuses on two key issues:

- Exploring how the environment fits into the property development process and specifically how developers view and interpret their responsibility in the broader environmental agenda facing planning for housing. My work in this regard focuses on exploring housebuilder attitudes towards green infrastructure delivery and examining how developers interpret and strategise environmental performance within a largely pro-growth policy agenda and recovering housing market context.

- Understanding housing supply constraints through a qualitative research agenda. Here my work seeks to examine current housing supply issues by exploring how and why housebuilders are responding to the recent planning policy and housing reforms within the broader context of ongoing macro-economic instability. In doing so, this research agenda seeks to challenge the more quantitative held assumptions surrounding the planning system acting as a blockage to growth.