Property Development Project Day 1

The starting point for any prospective property development should be an appraisal both in terms of potential and then financial.

The property I have been dealing with started as a four bedroom detached house built around 1920. Originally it had a big plot of land for a house just outside the centre of one of the market towns in Southern England. However when the original owner sold it in 1984, part of the garden was sold separately as a potential building plot.

The location plan shows the boundaries of the house in red.

It is only now when there is so much pressure for more housing plots in built up areas that another plot separation might be possible.

The house has frontages to two roads and the main part of the remaining garden makes up 8.7 metres of that frontage. There is a depth of on average 23.5 metres. It is within this area that I will build the new house.

Where to go from here?

Well for most people you now contact an architect that you know or who has been recommended to you.

For me it was slightly different since I have been around a while in this game and I decided to do virtually all the work myself.

Step 1 – I am already registered with an Internet company called Promap and from their site I can access an Ordnance Survey map at 1:1250 scale of the site. This costs about £1.30 then I export the map data in .dxf format to my computer. This is a little bit more expensive at £14.

Step 2 – I open AutoCad and convert the exported data into an AutoCad drawing. I now save twice (once as a base file that I can go back to at any time and the other as the file I will work on) and then start drawing how the development can take place.

Step 3 – Draw on all the constraints. By this I mean distances away from boundaries and back from the road so that a car can park in front of the new house.

Step 4 – Access the old house type plans that I have collected over the years from visiting many developments by local and national house builders. From these I can spot a house type that can be adapted to fit my plot.

Enough for Day 1, more later.


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