In terms of how quickly housing is built and the price at which it is sold, instead of building houses as quickly as possible, a range of evidence shows housebuilders tend to build them at a rate that is consistent with the local absorption rates, ie, the rate at which houses can be sold without needing to reduce their prices.
(a) The extent to which housebuilders can expand their supply in a local area is inherently limited by the extent to which they can get hold of further land with planning permission in the area. As a result, the effect of lowering their prices is more likely to bring sales forward in time, rather than increase their overall sales over the medium term; therefore, doing this will rarely be a profitmaximising strategy for housebuilders. Given that it is costly for housebuilders to have capital tied up in partly finished or finished, unsold homes, they are incentivised to control their build-out rate to a level that maintains selling prices.
(b) Builders’ incentives to pursue the strategy of maximising sales prices are reinforced by the way they compete to purchase developable land. Most land is bought under the residual valuation model, meaning that when housebuilders bid for land, they offer a price that is affordable based on their estimate of the value of the homes they can build on it. Given the competition we observe for land, housebuilders must offer the highest possible price to secure it. With all housebuilders subject to the same market forces, this further incentivises housebuilders to build out at a rate that supports high prices, rather than (outside of a housing market downturn) reducing prices to increase the volume they can sell.
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Decisions, Decisions, Decisions 
The conclusions are familiar and somewhat misguided. House builders do certainly aim to sell houses at best price. That is only rational. And certainly the complexities and delays in obtaining planning permission are built into those prices. However, the conclusions drawn take no account of the finite numbers of potential buyers. New houses are a relative luxury and during the marketing period for any new housing development, there will be a finite number of buyers who can get a mortgage. Couple that with the reducing pool of first time buyers and the many people who don’t want a new house with cramped rooms on a soulless estate and it’s hardly surprising that house builders only release houses in small batches over time. Building an entire development in one phase risks the need for heavy discounts and financial disaster.
But the most glaring omission is that more than 30% of the population can’t afford to own a home. The shortfall in house building against national targets must be made up by building affordable housing at scale. With net migration of more than 670,000 people last year, the problem is only worsening. The focus on building more housing for private sale is a head-in-sand wilful avoidance of the facts.