Property Development Project - Day 6

And as promised here are the elevation plans for the new house.

These in fact are the plans that will be submitted for planning permission, the first plans I drew included some detailed panels on the front elevation to match up with the two adjoining properties on either side of the plot.

It is not an attractive house with that garage sticking out in front but it works and it fits on the plot available.

In the next couple of posts I will include some floor plans for alterations to the original house.


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Property Development Project - Day 5

Well here are the proposed floor plans for the new house.

We have a three bedroom detached house with a net internal floor area of about 850 Sq Ft. This is not generous but it is in line with many of the new houses being offered by the big national housebuilders.

There is no real surprise about that since this house is a reworking of one of their designs.

At the same time I have done elevation plans for the new house and these will be posted tomorrow, with luck.


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Property Development Project - Day 4

Well here are those floor plans of the house as it is at the start of the project.

I am sorry that they are not at the same scale but you can get an idea of the layout.

We need to add a garage on the side, but for the rest what other improvements could be made at the same time that will add value without costing money that will not be seen back in the sale price that can be expected on completion?

At the moment I will leave you with those thoughts and turn to creating a floor plan for the proposed new detached house.

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Property Development Project - Day 3

There is one thing I forgot to mention about the conversation with the planning officer and that is that the Local Authority has a policy that all letters should be answered in 10 working days (i.e. 2 weeks to the rest of us).

Do I wait this long before doing anything?

No – that would be showing too much patience. So for a start on the next stage I measure up the floor plan of the old house so that I can try out some extension and alteration ideas that will include the new garage that is going to be required.

The measuring and drawing of the ground and first floor plans will take all of day 3. Remember I need to make everything fit down to at least 5 – 10mm accuracy. I will be drawing the plans to the nearest 1mm and eventually these will be used by the builders to price up and then to specify and build to.


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Property Development Project - Day 2

Step 5 – Having drawn up the plan shown here (or something very similar). Ring up the Local Authority Planning Department and find out who in the planning team dealing with this area can discuss my proposals.

Step 6 – Having got a name and with great luck found that this person is available I speak to him on the phone and describe the scheme. The planner suggests writing in with a copy of the plan and he will give an informal opinion.

Step 7 – Draft a letter, print the plan and post both to the planning officer.

There is not much more that can be achieved on Day 2, since further work could be wasted if the answer comes back as ‘not a chance’.

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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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PBR Part 4 - Development Land Tax

In my previous set of posts on the subject of the PBR I have been touching on the Government’s proposals to speed up planning and thus the delivery of new houses. You may have gathered that I am somewhat sceptical of the effectiveness of these measures.

However the final idea produced by the Chancellor is sure to reduce the delivery of new properties - Development Land Tax.

This has been imposed in various forms before and on each occasion it has led to less land coming up for sale as land and property owners are naturally disinclined to pay more tax when they are already paying Capital Gains Tax on any increase in value when a disposal takes place.

However this time the Chancellor says it will be different, this tax will be a Local Development Land Tax.

At the moment development gain is taxed locally by way of S.106 contributions imposed by your Local Planning Authority. The new tax is proposed to simplify this by a flat rate sum imposed on the grant of planning permission.

Some Councils already operate a similar system with contributions of around £2,000 - £3,000 per new property. Some even have sliding scale dependent on the size of the new property. However this is not supposed to be a Tax, it is supposed to relate to the cost of local infrastructure requirements.

You can be sure that a Tax will be levied at a far higher rate. This will either slow down the release of Land or stop a number of developments altogether.

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Property Fortunes 2006 - Happy New Year

It has been a while since my last post and there is a very good reason for that. I have just been completing my last property development project, which is the extension and refurbishment of a four bedroom detached house plus developing a new three bedroom detached house in part of the original garden.

This required a lot of work on my part in the run up to Christmas so that the family could enjoy the festive season in relative comfort.

In a while I have thought that as an example I will run a series of posts that will take everyone through the process that I have experienced from the point of initial appraisal drawings and planning enquiries to the completion of the development.

I will not do it entirely in real time since there were periods when nothing at all happened. However I will keep a note of the number of days from the inception so that you can get an idea not only of the sequence of events but also those frustrating periods when you are in the hands of others regarding progress.

For the sake of completion the next post will complete the series on the Pre-budget Report and will tackle the reintroduction of Development Land Tax.

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and that we can all look forward to prosperous New Year with a stable housing market.

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