Last week, we shared our thoughts on rapport building.
In our view, the key to being able to do a deal is being able to build rapport with the landowners.
You ultimately need to understand the vendor’s position, what is driving them, whether they need to sell, want to sell, and what will be the key factors in any decision. In most cases, the money will be a key driver, although it likely won’t be the sole factor in getting a deal over the line.
The challenge for individuals starting can be the confidence to sell themselves and the prospect to the landowners adequately. You must sell yourself to be the person they want to deal with. Be the person who will make their life easier. They might be able to squeeze a few pounds extra from someone else, but if that person makes their stomach turn, it probably won’t be worth the stress to the vendor.
The good thing is that people are waiting to be influenced and will take up offers they believe will improve their lives.
When you genuinely believe in your service, it’s easy to get that clarity of thought and the confidence required to sell yourself and your service, knowing you are providing an excellent service to the vendor. Yes, you stand to make money, but you deliver even greater value to the vendor. The vendor currently owns a piece of property worth X, but you can increase that to multiple of X, a win-win for all involved. You just need to convince the vendor that you have their best intentions at heart and get them over the natural scepticism that we all have.
Our letter drop has resulted in 3 landowners inviting us to view their sites.
Deal 1:
Located in the Hertfordshire countryside, this first site is a collection of farm buildings. Under permitted development rights, converting agricultural buildings is much easier to obtain. You don’t need full planning if you meet the set criteria, which takes the decision-making process away from the local authority. A real bonus.
We have visited this site twice, and it’s gone very well from a rapport-building process. The landowner is easy to chat with, and I’ve found key information out. The challenge for this site is that it’s a little complicated as it’s not owned by the person I’m dealing with but by the children of the deceased farmer, and not all the children are seeing eye to eye on what should be done with the farm.
Deal 2:
Located in Hertfordshire, this site has paddock land. Due to the surrounding fields having planning permission, it has excellent potential.
However, two issues are apparent with this site. Access is proving to be very challenging, and secondly, the rapport stage isn’t going as we’d like.
We always like to make an excuse to revisit the site to take a further look; it gives us another chance to chat with the owner, ask some more questions, win them over, and build that rapport. But in this case, the seller doesn’t want to play ball. They didn’t want us to visit again, didn’t understand why we needed to, and just wanted us to make an offer.
That’s not how we work. We like to try to build relationships rather than make offers.
Deal 3:
Again, located in the Hertfordshire countryside, this collection of farm buildings would work under the Class Q rules and permit development.
This is a much more compact site, but it would get to 1000m2 of converted area, the maximum allowed under permitted development on agricultural buildings to residential conversions.
The meetings with the landowner have gone well, and we’ve been able to build that rapport during the early meetings.
This site is a disused collection of buildings cut off from the rest of the farm.
The real skill with these agricultural sites is that you can get the change of use to residential through Class Q, which is much more straightforward, but then go back for a new application once that’s approved for a new build scheme on the basis that you have a powerful fallback position with the conversion to residential already approved.
We are currently having our planning consultant to review all these deals whilst crunching the numbers and looking at the viability of each site to come up with a figure we could pay for each.
Next week, we’ll share the progress.
We will share more details about these sites as things progress, but we will hold that information private at this stage. Can’t be divulging such information at this stage for obvious reasons.