Buy to let holiday home owners from East Hampshire, and East and West Sussex are set to benefit from an increase in tourism and a significant rise in the value of their properties when the new South Downs National Park is created on 31 March this year.

It is expected that the South Downs National Park, which has taken 60 years to come to fruition, will become England’s most visited National Park and will include more than 320,000km of footpaths.

A conference entitled the ‘South Downs National Park Which Direction?’ was organised by chartered surveyors Smiths Gored on Friday 29 January and was attended by 100 landowners and farmers from across the National Park.

Rupert Clark, a partner at the company and head of Rural Estate Management, said: “There will be increased opportunities for landowners, both large and small, from the increase in tourism into the area and we expect to see a significant uplift in the value of cottage rentals.

“We would also expect to see house prices increase upwards of 10 per cent, as estate agents inevitably make a play on National Park status.

“There will also be challenges ahead in the provision of affordable housing and increasing holiday home ownership will have an impact on housing supply. The South Downs is already a relatively expensive part of the country to purchase property, particularly for agricultural and key workers.

“The added challenges and bureaucracy that will be involved in achieving planning permissions is only likely to make this position worse.”

However, Richard Shaw, the interim chief executive of the South Downs National Park Authority, and Nick Herbert, MP for Arundel and South Downs and Shadow Secretary of State or Environment, Food and Rural Affairs told delegates at a recent conference to discuss the creation of the park that the Conservative Government’s election pledge to return power to local communities may mean that the South Downs National Park Authority has no choice but to delegate a significant proportion of responsibilities back to local authorities, including that of planning.

Andrew Pawlik, a partner at Adams & Remers based in Lewes, a town that falls within the Park boundary, said: “It is usual that a National Park Authority becomes the planning authority for all planning applications within the Park boundary. It was suggested that this may not be the case with the South Downs National Park. If so, this will be good news for home owners and businesses within the Park.”