Sensible house build

[Bozza]

Local authorities have planning policies.  This is what the people who decide whether to grant planning permission work to.  If you’re looking at a specific modern style house you’ll need to find a plot that building it won’t conflict with that policy.  By restricting the house style to your own bespoke taste inevitably will restrict suitable plot availability, so you may have to either compromise on house style, or location.

If a plot has planning permission it will be likely for an agreed style of house, or in principle.  If you commit to that plot there is no guarantee you’ll be able to build they style you prefer. Simple guide for a plot is look around what’s already been built.  If your proposed house is similar you are more likely to get it through planning.

 

Those who apply for PP for something in keeping and respectful to the local vernacular tend to get planning permission without too much trouble, assuming it’s not green belt or whatever, and doesn’t conflict with local  planning policy.

 

[Alan Ambrose]

You may be underestimating the likelihood / cost / ease of find a plot that you can get planning on / has got planning on by a factor of 50-100. More opportunity / cheaper / prettier in Scotland, of course, than Bucks. 😎 

[twice round the block]

On 03/11/2023 at 11:34, morsing said:

 

Many cool plots have sold on auction for £30 - 40 000 in the year we have been looking. Cost isn't the problem, it's location.

 

And buying an £800 000 house only to knock it down is way, way out of our budget.

 

 

But good to hear comments, it prepares me a bit for talking to Ström again if we manage to find a plot.

 

Regards,

Henrik Morsing

You won't find a plot in Buckinghamshire for 30-40 k that you stand a chance of getting planning permission on.

For that sort of money you will be lucky to get a pony paddock with a loose box on it.

The  cheapest I would expect to find a plot for with outline permission on would be north of £140.000, and for that money the location ( main road frontage) and / or the size and design   ( two bed ) may not be good. 

 

Any plot with good potential will have been snapped up by a builder before it even goes on the open market, it pays to stay sweet with your local rural area estate agents!!!!

 

I think the land sales you have been looking at are for amenity land, where unscrupulous sellers carve up a pasture field next to a canal and sell them off as plots. ( That will be at the end of my lane then ) where there is no chance of mooring a boat, getting mains services or erecting any form of structure. 

[Jilly]

Yup we’ve had people caught out on here before. A chap had bought a plot for £10k thinking he could build on it, had not done due diligence, and it was essentially one of a strip in a carved up farmer’s field.
Roughly speaking, in the Home Counties, land with planning can approach £1million/acre 

[Ferdinand]

On 08/11/2023 at 11:25, morsing said:

 Hi,

 

Thanks for the thoughts. I see why costs was brought up. I didn't realise I was looking at cheap problem plots, I had been going on onthemarket over the last year setting pricing between £0-100k having no idea what it should cost, and most plots were £20-40k so assumed that was what to expect.

 

Even if they come with planning permission, they wouldn't come with permission for our specific design though? I'm hoping a very low (height-wise) and low-key bungalow would attract less arguments.

 

We have been looking at this a couple of times (potentially offering to buy half of it):

 

West Leith Land for sale - £100,000 (onthemarket.com)

 

But when I called the agent, he said there was alpacas on it and we'd never get planning permission for a property. I find that statement extremely odd, what is he basing that on?

 

Regards,

Henrik Morsing

 

At that location that's being sold as a pony paddock not a building plot - and you may even need Change of Use permission to make it a pony paddock iirc. 

 

Or maybe for speculation as a possibility for future development; if they though PP could be obtained now they would have done so (you can bet they took advice) and it would be worth 10-50x as much. A developer would look to do a rural estate on that 1.6 acres with perhaps 15-30 dwellings.

 

It's in both AONB and Green Belt (I think), but PP has been obtained to build an estate in both half a mile away.

 

It might be worthwhile if you had horsey daughters who would use it, and with a retirement possible bonus in 15-20 years time if more such land locally goes for development.

 

Noel Edmonds used to live in near Tring; he was once done for driving his GT40 at high speed on the Tring Bypass. But I understand he has buggered off to New Zealand in his dotage.

 

[Ferdinand]

On 30/10/2023 at 12:03, morsing said:

We live in Buckinghamshire and we are disillusioned with British houses. Main issues are:

 

- No thought put into layout and usability

- No utility rooms

- Virtually no insulation, even on new builds

- Old fashioned

- Low quality

 

Possibly off-topic, I'm honestly not convinced of most of those.

 

The "virtually no insulation one" is imo fanciful. I'd say that much thought is put into layout, but that much of it goes into space efficiency to keep costs down as desired by the market.

 

Two things that that are definitely true are :

 

1 - That we have an older stock profile than most places in Europe (partly due to less war damage than elsewhere - 200k dwellings destroyed, 3.5m damaged, partly due to preferring traditional houses), and that many of the owner occupiers of such properties have refused to invest in their own properties, despite having Brobdingnagian amounts of free money being shovelled down their throats through tax-free house price appreciation and inflation of the demand side by Govt policy.

 

(Unlike rented housing, Owner Occupied is not regulated for improvement. Unless maybe in Scotland(?) )

 

2 - Energy used to heat UK houses has fallen significantly over the last 20 years or so - median EPC rating has gone from about ~50 to ~68, which is a big change.

 

I'm used to seeing endless reports about how terrible the UK is plastered across the attention-seeking media, but eg the last one I saw (which made "this is fact" articles everywhere) was by a company called Tado who were trying to sell expensive hproducts, and published little or no actual date in support of their claims.

 

So I am sceptical.

 

Ferdinand

[SteamyTea]

12 hours ago, Ferdinand said:

Noel Edmonds used to live in near Tring

Not long after his wife left him, we both used to do our shopping at Aylesbury's Sainsbury on a Monday evening.

Used to see him about town quite a lot, along with DLT and Mike Read (DJ).

Buckinghamshire seems to have a lot of BBC people in it.

[billt]

11 hours ago, Ferdinand said:

many of the owner occupiers of such properties have refused to invest in their own properties, despite having Brobdingnagian amounts of free money being shovelled down their throats through tax-free house price appreciation and inflation of the demand side by Govt policy.

 

Yes, but those Brobdingnagian amounts are hypothetical; not available for home improvement until realised by selling the house. As an ex colleague of mine, who owned a house with a Thames frontage and a boathouse used to say "asset rich, cash poor".

[Ferdinand]

3 minutes ago, billt said:

 

Yes, but those Brobdingnagian amounts are hypothetical; not available for home improvement until realised by selling the house. As an ex colleague of mine, who owned a house with a Thames frontage and a boathouse used to say "asset rich, cash poor".

 

But they aren't hypothetical - they can be eg equity for a small increase in mortgage. When I needed to spend a little money to improve my house I increased my mortgage by 10%. And it pays back either through eg (a) increased value of a higher quality house (which is here at last) or (b) Reduced costs at today's fuel prices.

 

We may be a little off topic, so perhaps we should stop !

 

F

 

[ToughButterCup]

On 03/11/2023 at 11:34, morsing said:

...

I was mostly interested in time-scales and planning. It seems like planning permission is what generally causes problems. What in particular? Annoying neighbours? Council? And why? Hopefully 

....

 

I  don't think its possible to generalise. Would that we could. It'd all be a lot easier.

 

There might be a local agenda: one particular Planning Officer might have a bee in the belfry about [...] , the Planning department might be badly organised - high staff turnover, got any precious wildlife locally .? ..  Planners are more than up to neighbours being the opposite,  Local Councillors sometimes  kickstart their broomsticks. 

 

All the above is out of your control. But you can control the way you handle the politics and micropolitics. Here, have a read

[saveasteading]

31 minutes ago, ToughButterCup said:

There might be a local agenda

There is and the first job is to read it. The local plan.

Keep within the parameters and most problems go away.

Planning officers work to the policy in front of them and personal opinions don't normally affect the outcome.

Any objections are also liable to the published plan.

Then present your proposal neatly and making it easy to deal with.

 

I like to think of the first sight of our proposals eliciting a smile from the planner....' this is going to be an easy one'.

Tidy, well presented and compliant.

Vary from that and it may cause delay.

 

[Alan Ambrose]

>>> Planning officers work to the policy in front of them and personal opinions don't normally affect the outcome.

 

I'm going to beg to differ - but it may be that it depends a lot on the particular planner and the particular LPA. I've had a planning officer tell me in a pre-app that a design 'would not be considered acceptable' with 3 or 4 detailed reasons why ... and then in a full application tell me that they intended to approve the same design. That's with no apology or attempt at explanation for the change in 'policy'. The flip in that case would seem to be to my advantage, but I've also experienced the opposite.

[mjc55]

On 03/11/2023 at 12:28, miike said:

They also mention in their last post about seeing plots going for £30-40k. If they’re looking at the very bottom of the market, price wise, for plots, then it’s probably worth pointing out when an architect they’re looking at is at the other end of the spectrum. 
 

@morsing Just to prepare yourself on planning time lines, I bought a plot already with planning permission. I applied to change the design to a more contemporary one and it took 2 years from the app being verified to receiving approval. The actual building work is straightforward in comparison. 

Why 2 years?  Planning shouldn't take that long unless it is refused and goes to appeal!

 

Was there something particulally unusual about your application that would mean that it took so long?

[morsing]

Ok, 

 

Thanks, definitely some food for thought. I'll start by seeking out the local planning policies.

 

Adding £400 000 to the plot cost will put a damper on the build itself.

 

I do think setting a minimum plot size for builds would stop the cramped developments popping up all around where we live.

 

Regards,

Henrik Morsing

[saveasteading]

36 minutes ago, morsing said:

I do think setting a minimum plot size for builds would stop the cramped developments popping up all around where we live.

Yes it would. But the landowners and developers wouldn't make so much. They have influence on government.

Also, if every plot was twice the size, the suburbs would increase dramatically.

My LA had a plan for avoiding sprawl, ( terraces and flats instead of semis) but they couldn't enforce it.

[SteamyTea]

15 hours ago, saveasteading said:

My LA had a plan for avoiding sprawl, ( terraces and flats instead of semis) but they couldn't enforce it.

That was lucky for everyone.

I drive up the M5 every couple of weeks, there is a new development near Taunton, seems to be mainly detached houses.

Talk about crammed in, and next to a motorway.

And it seems to be on a flood plain.

 

About 2% of the UKs land area is housing, about time we added another 1% to that.  Many of the old arguments i.e. near work, transport links, schools and services are really outdated these days.  Not as if householders only want to walk or travel by bicycle.

My nearest town is 2.5 miles away.  40 minutes walk.  Walking is not a practical solution.  And the town is rubbish for shopping, but they have built a few thousand houses on the outskirts.  The town has not improved, still no decent shops or restaurants.

[Alan Ambrose]

>>> Not as if householders only want to walk or travel by bicycle.

 

My LPA think that's their preferred transport method (for the owners of new homes that is, I'm sure they'll still want to use their cars themselves) (: