HOUSE price booms seem like good news to the house owner sitting on what they perceive as their own mini gold mine.

Yet rocketing prices leave victims too, especially in the over-heated south east.

In the complicated picture of winners and losers, York looks set to win by fulfilling the rapid need for housing in and around London. A manufacturer in the city is set for a mammoth rise in jobs and profits after the housing minister Lord Falconer said its modular homes could help solve Britain's housing crisis.

Yorkon side-steps traditional bricks and mortar by making ready-built homes at its Huntington factory. These housing modules can then be transported to the site and assembled into homes in half the time taken by the more usual method.

This modern process has already proved successful for Yorkon, a subsidiary of Portakabin, which has won a 2002 Civic Trust Award for a five-storey apartment block commission by the Peabody Trust housing association in Hackney, East London.

The flagship project, which features terracotta and cedarwood cladding plus private balconies, has just been short-listed for the Sterling Prize for architecture - a commendation which shows that modular buildings can strive for architectural merit while serving a vital functional purpose.

Yorkon has also put up one of its "production not construction" buildings closer to home, with the £2 million Poplar Tree Gardens development at Sixth Avenue, in Tang Hall, York.

This should prove to be a happy story for York, as the pioneering Yorkon is the only company in the country geared up to produce modular homes.

The Government hopes that the York-built structures could be erected on publicly-owned land and used as homes for nurses, teachers, police officers and others who have been priced out of the housing market because of rampant inflation in house prices.

However, the Government still faces difficulties in pursuing such a scheme, because planning consent can slow matters down and remove the benefits of quickly completed modular buildings. Lord Falconer should consider speeding up the planning process, while ensuring that sensible restrictions remain.

But if all goes to plan, it looks as though York-built homes could be making life easier in the busy south east.

Updated: 10:54 Wednesday, May 08, 2002