Development and land
Housebuilders, land promoters and SME developers, deciding on schemes with numbers that take a week to assemble.
Where it breaks
A small sample of the problems we hear most often in development and land. Not a complete list, and not all of them will be yours.
- 01
Appraising a site takes a week
A site comes in and someone rebuilds the appraisal from scratch: comparables, build costs, S106 assumptions, finance. By the time the number lands the agent has three other offers.
- 02
Every appraisal is a different spreadsheet
Each one starts as a copy of the last, then diverges. Two schemes appraised by two people use different build cost rates, and nobody notices until the board compares them.
- 03
Land supply held in someone's head
Options, promotion agreements and pre-app conversations sit in email and a pipeline sheet. Nobody can say how many units the pipeline holds, or which options lapse this year.
- 04
Planning conditions rediscovered on site
The consent carries ninety conditions across forty pages. Which are pre-commencement, and which have been discharged, gets worked out by reading it again every time somebody asks.
- 05
Cost reporting a month behind
Valuations, variations and the QS report arrive on different cycles and get reconciled monthly. GDV against actual cost is a month old whenever you look at it, and the change that moved it usually started as a line in an email somebody logged a fortnight late.
- 06
A gateway you can't put a date on
On anything above eighteen metres or seven storeys, work cannot start until the Building Safety Regulator approves it and cannot be occupied until it certifies it. The statutory period is one number and the observed one is longer. That risk goes into the cost plan as a percentage somebody guessed and the funder then argues down.
What we'd build
A small sample of the kind of thing we build. What we'd actually scope depends on which of the problems above is costing you most.
An appraisal in an afternoon
Comparables, title, planning history and site constraints pulled from a postcode. Your own build cost rates and finance terms applied, and a first-pass appraisal returned with every assumption listed.
More sites appraised per week, and your number in front of the agent before the other three.
One appraisal model, used by everyone
The same cost base, finance assumptions and output format on every scheme, so two schemes are comparable because they were built the same way.
Schemes that are genuinely comparable, and no decision taken on two different cost bases.
The consent read once and tracked
Conditions extracted from the decision notice, sorted into pre-commencement, pre-occupation and ongoing, then tracked to discharge. S106 and CIL triggers dated.
No pre-commencement condition discovered on site, and S106 and CIL triggers hit on time.
Live cost against GDV
Cost, variations and drawdowns set against the appraisal as they happen, so the margin on a scheme is current rather than monthly. Variations get picked up from the correspondence that raised them rather than from the report that catches up with them.
Margin drift visible in the week it starts rather than in next month's report.
Recognise any of these?
Thirty minutes with a founder. Walk us through the problems your team lives with and we'll talk about whether any of it has to stay that way.