Akotia J and Fortune C (2012) Early stage evaluation of the socio-economic benefits of built environment housing regeneration projects In: Smith, S.D (Ed) Procs 28 th Annual ARCOM Conference, 3-5 September 2012, Edinburgh, UK, Association of Researchers in Construction Management, 1279-1288. EARLY STAGE EVALUATION OF THE SOCIO- ECONOMIC BENEFITS OF BUILT ENVIRONMENT HOUSING REGENERATION PROJECTS Julius Akotia and Chris Fortune School of the Built Environment, University of Salford, Greater Manchester, M5 4WT, UK In recent years, sustainable regeneration has been recognised as being of major economic and social concern in the world. In the UK for instance, government has initiated a number of policies and evaluation methods to deal with some of the environmental problems associated with regeneration projects. However, the post construction evaluation of these projects has often resulted in them being seen as not achieving their set objectives. Attempts aimed at evaluating the implementation of sustainability by built environment professionals have primarily been limited to their - economic aspects being neglected. While there have been a number of studies on sustainability and its evaluation in relation to regeneration projects in the UK, there has not been any well-defined built environment research that has been able to deal holistically with the broader issues of sustainability in terms of benefits/impacts of the regeneration projects to the end-user and the communities concerned. The findings of an exploratory study that adopted a semi-structured interviews approach for data collection from six senior regeneration managers of construction industry organizations involved in housing regeneration projects in the UK are presented in this paper. The findings reveal a lack of a mechanism to evaluate the socio-economic benefits of sustainability in relation to housing regeneration projects at the early stage of th sustainability continue to be the most dominant factor of sustainability considered by potential socio-economic benefits. Keywords: socio-economic benefit, sustainable housing, regeneration projects. INTRODUCTION The concept of sustainable development and regeneration has been an essential focal point of government policy for sometime in the UK and it has contributed to the et al. 2011). Many of the earlier initiatives that were meant to tackle socio-economic disparities have focused on improving the physical and environmental aspects of regeneration. In more recent times, there has been a number of research projects which sought to study and analyze how the UK built environment is responding to the challenges of integrating sustainability into regeneration projects (Dixon, 2006). The Sustainable Development Commission, (SDC, 2003), suggested that the development of regeneration has proved to be a testing and on-going challenge for government agencies, construction industry