Chaos

Thanks a lot for this. It really explains why all the housing the UK is so similar and self build so minority. One small question. When a permission has been granted, it is for a specific project, right? So even if some land has permission, and you buy it based on that, it might not allow to build whatever you want. Only what whoever asked for that permission tried to get accepted. Am I correct? If so, having "permission" as a general thing seems kind of worthless, unless you really don't care what you're building.

Definitely. We were looking at prices in Barcelona for plots and we definitely know that it'd be way cheaper, also way easier since self building over there is quite common and standard practice, and there's way less restrictions in regards of the house type. You can see houses of any type everywhere. But all this comes to personal reasons. We can always go back there and stay at friends and family, or even rent. But we don't want to get stuck there if for some reason we struggle financially at some point, or there's pandemics, or we have kids. Not because it's bad, at all. We love it. It's just "not adventure" for us, and the world feels stuck. But again, it's a pure personal experience from us being from there. Moving abroad allowed us to grow so much, and we want to keep the rate going, so it's a bit of pushing ourselves. FYI, foreseeing all the time and effort this is going to take, maybe we were indeed on a rush. We are leaning now to just get on the property ladder the easy way, just buying a built house. And then, once we're not losing our money on rent, we have all the time in the world to do the next step without a rush, even if it takes years to make it. We might even change our minds by then as well. Another thing I quickly learned while reading today: What we were looking for wasn't a self build. It was actually a custom build. Might have confused some of you, and myself up here.

Well, none of you are very encouraging... 😅 I know I sound very naive, and I'm at the stage of being so, I guess. I started my post that way. Thanks a lot for the resource, these hubs of info are just what I'm looking for now. Just started reading. It confuses me a bit though, as every step begins assuming you already have the land. So I cannot plan without a plot. And I cannot buy a plot without knowing if I'll be able to build what I want. So not sure where to begin, really.

Not at all. Never been there. Obviously if we had decided to seriously get interested we would have done research and probably visited. But what else can we do? We cannot move to every place there's a plot available. As I said, everywhere south of Midlands and with direct train to London works (as long as it's safe obv). How could I narrow that?

Not suitable in terms of legally allowed? Are there any minimums or common rules? Or in terms that a normal house wouldn't fit? I've seen some of these you say, but again, our imagined house doesn't need more and we don't WANT more. We don't want a garden to take care of, so we actually prefer smaller plots than larger ones with potential.

Wow. If that's really the case then all this might then not be an option for us... I had been looking at recent final auction prices (this ones are from 14th Feb for example) and there were definitely options in the price range I mentioned. The £100k+ are actually few and probably rare ones. I don't know, I'll keep researching. Thanks.

Hi Ian, thanks, will definitely do this. I was expecting to find some pinned threads gathering FAQs, but all I found were individual questions though. Isn't there any wiki of major resource where most common things are? There is a hurry, but just a hurry to start. There is nothing stopping us at the moment to start advancing, it's just lack of info. We know this is definitely not a short process, but we just want to be progressing. Thanks Mark. You mean that price is cheap for a plot, or that price for the total project?

Hi everyone, really excited to be here. I'm Axel. After a long process of deliberation between ourselves, me and my partner decided to finally go down the route of buying property in the UK. A bit of background. We are both Spanish from Barcelona, and we came to Solihull 5 years ago now looking for an adventure. The last couple of years we wanted to leave the UK and try going nomad for a while, but in the end we were undecisive. Finally, we have decided that before doing that, we want to create our first base camp somewhere, and that somewhere we prefer it to be the UK. Now, we don't have a lot of specifications, and we are EXTREMELY unfamiliar with all of this. Things we know/wish for are: We don't have a specific location in mind, but location is important. Having a large international airport nearby is key for us. Birmingham has worked well for us so far, and while we know going norther would be cheaper, the airports are not any better, plus we get further away from London options. So ideally, we would be looking anywhere from Birmingham to the South (we know that's the most expensive part though, but still evaluating the options). We don't have a car (we sold it 2y ago as we didn't need or want it) and ideally we would like to live without one. We use Uber and public transport as needed. Meaning it's sort of important not to be fully isolated, even when we like it. Although if the location was amazing cost-wise, we can consider the car no problem. We want a base camp. Not a fully fledged house. And this is key. Our dream about this started when, after traveling a lot and staying at lots of different places, we realised we really didn't need much to live in. 50sqm were quite enough for us, maybe tight, but 70sqm definitely enough. We currently live in a 3 bedroom semi attached house, and while we love it, we could perfectly live in just the base floor if the bedroom was down here. That is including our entire extension/dining room is a huge office. This is a must for us, the office. We work from home, and have 3 screen setups. We have all this on a full sized board table (2440x1220mm). We are happier to have a tiny main bedroom, but a massive office instead. Linked with the previous, we are looking at a less UK standard house. We are European, and while we love our current UK traditional house, we prefer another style. More northern, modern. Here come the wishes: We have been looking at pre-fab houses, and realised they are really cheap. £25k-£75k we should be able to perfectly find something that suits us. With that in mind we thought: "That's actually cheap for a house! How cheap can we get a plot?" And looking a bit, we started seeing plots that ranged a LOT in price. From £10k-£20k all the way to £100k+. This idea of a base camp makes sense for us if we think of aiming at a total cost of around £100k. With some margin. Up to £130k I'd say. Now you might say (what my mum said to the plan) "Well you're not getting a house for that price". Ok... We just want a tiny dog house. Really, don't think based on normal standards. We could definitely live in just our garden space. Think of a container house. You don't need lots of meters for that plot. Can't we get that plot type for up to £30-£70k? That's our mind picture. Is this feasible somehow? We are not in a rush. But we wouldn't like to leave it for a year either. We have been looking at plots at Zoopla, but as I mentioned earlier, we are extreme newbies. They don't teach this in school. We don't know what to look for in a plot. For example, one of the latest I found was this one. In Reading, 1h from London, between 2 houses. Super well connected, perfectly residential area, seems large enough for our case... No idea what's wrong with it for £10k really. Sure, it's an auction, not final price, but... idk. Maybe? What am I missing? We don't know if we need to ask for a mortgage before or after. Or how a self build mortgage (or any mortgage) works at all, or what good rates are. I'm financially literate though, just not familiar with mortgages. (Worried about this as we are both directors of our own LTD. Salaries are set arbitrarily low for tax purposes, and we get paid in dividends. Not sure if that's easily accepted.) We don't know what the process looks like. In my mind it looks like this. Find plot. Find lender and ask for mortgage. Buy plot. Find ??? that checks with Council (?) that you can build what you want in there. Wait until Council approves. Find ??? that designs/plans what you want to build. (If it's the pre fab I guess they directly do this). Pay. Wait for it and oversee every tiny detail as I want it perfect (and the contractors we've had in the UK so far haven't left great impressions). As you can see, no idea of the agents involved in the process, or even their names. Please correct me as much as needed, this is what I came here for. One thing I know I did right. I already opened a LISA for me and my partner and maxed contributions. And I think this is basically it! Being migrants in the UK, we don't have a large acquaintance circle here, and the ones we have are young. So we don't have who to ask for advice on all these processes really. That's why I went to look for an online community and start learning from kind strangers. And here I am! Thank you so much for sticking by this huge wall of text, and I will be super grateful for any help or guide or anything you can share that helps me step forward even just a bit.