The first part of finding deals is easy: use a service such as LandInsight, where you can scan over your local area and quickly identify interesting plots of land.
What do we mean by interesting? Land which has value-add potential. The best example is where you take a farmer’s field, worth £10,000 – £15,000 per acre as agricultural land, but get planning for residential, which is then worth £1,000,000 plus per acre.
The same principle applies to small-scale stuff. Take the garden to a residential property; if it can be cut off and planning can be achieved, you massively increase the value of the land whilst hardly any loss of value, if any, is felt to the existing residential property. These days, having a small tight garden is standard practice; you just need to find the properties that can lose part of the garden for development while maintaining adequate gardens for the existing property.
Another key factor in our search is identifying sites in areas with reasonable sales values, which we are putting at £350/sq ft. So a 1,000sq ft property is valued at £350k. If sales values are, say £250/sq ft, it’s hard to achieve enough value to justify the work.
We have identified 108 sites and have sent letters to those landowners this week. When undertaking this work, we like to do it all at once, as in sending all 108 letters out on one day instead of sending out one or two letters a week. When we do it all together, we are ready to receive the calls and can arrange our diary so site visits and appraising deals can be done together.
So, what deals have we identified:
St Albans:
St Albans is a high-value area, which is a great start when looking for sites, as any deals will stack if you can secure at the right price. This site offers lots of potential, and if secured, we would try to secure some surrounding gardens to increase the site. At this early stage, we won’t spend any time working out what we could get on the site as it’s just wasting time until you get a response. We prefer the scattergun approach, where we send out a ton of letters on deals and can study them in detail once we get a response.
The only things we check for at this early stage are the planning history, easily pulled up using LandInsight, access to the site, and ensure the land is private. We avoid any sites owned by the local authority /government, as they generally don’t just sell off land, but have to put land through auctions to be seen to achieve the best price.
We would also target sites in built-up areas, where infill and development will be more acceptable. The only reason we would target the Greenbelt is if we could find sites where we could use permitted development rights to achieve planning.
Bedfordshire Village
A more significant proposition here with this site offering lots of potential if you can overcome the main issue of access. The current road to the site wouldn’t be adequate, so a new road would have to be sought. But if you could secure this site, you could then secure it on the assumption you need to source an alternative piece of land to secure access. Due to the number of units possible on this it could warrant such costs to ensure access, which is why we feel its worth a letter even though access is an issue.
Hitchin
Again, this is an ambitious site. However, with the sites to the south of this plot being already developed it creates an argument that this garden land could be developed.
Bedfordshire Village:
A good number of outbuildings sit just behind the residential units, making this ripe for development to residential. Residential land is the most valuable use class, so changing commercial uses to residential can be profitable.
Hitchin:
Sites like this are obvious, staring you in the face, but often, it just comes down to timing. I’m sure the owner has been approached many times, but you just need that bit of luck so that the owner is ready to listen to offers when your letter lands.
Hertfordshire Village:
Great potential good-sized site if you can pull it off, surrounded by residential.
This is a selection of 6 sites we have sent letters on. Along with the sites that can be identified by searching over areas on your computer, you should also watch for deals as you go about your day. If you identify land or potential sites, make a note and then check out the owners using LandInsight.
Along with the deals we’ve identified on LandInsight, we’ve also recently identified two extra sites. One of these is in Highgate, a parade of run-down shops, which, after looking for the ownership information, we can see have one owner. Although this site is outside our normal area, with such potential value in the deal, we would travel to try to make it work. The other deal is a single-storey shop I’ve spotted, which sits on a plot with potential due to the surrounding land.
Next week, we’ll share the process of receiving calls, how we manage them, and any initial conversations we have.
If you missed last week’s newsletter, you can catch up on it by visiting LANDpreneur.co.uk