New concept to make self and custom build easier and more accessible.

[Matt Perkins]

Hi all, 

 

I would love your feedback on a concept I'm developing to make self-build and custom builds more accessible and easier. 

 

I'm a chartered surveyor and project manager, and noticed that there's a real gap in the market for the average person to choose a custom build over the boring generic new build developments churned out by the big housebuilders. 

 

As such, I am thinking of developing a platform to digitise land and building into a fully immersive digital environment, allowing people to visualise and customise their dream home pre-development. I would then project manage all the necessary disciplines to deliver their dream home!

 

My intention is not to market or advertise this, simply to gather some valuable feedback from self and custom-build enthusiasts like your good selves 🙂 

 

Many thanks in advance, 

 

Matt

[IanR]

1 hour ago, Matt Perkins said:

As such, I am thinking of developing a platform to digitise land and building into a fully immersive digital environment, allowing people to visualise and customise their dream home pre-development.

 

Sorry, but that's not the road block to more people building custom homes.

[ProDave]

Availability of sensible priced plots and then the extra cost of a custom build compared to a standard box, is what limits the number of self builds.

 

If only government were to mandate that the mass market house builders who buy up most of the building land in large blocks, must sell a certain percentage of their plots for self build, at the same per house cost as the whole site cost them.

[saveasteading]

8 minutes ago, ProDave said:

must sell a certain percentage of their plots for self build, 

 

At first I thought, great idea. But they could end up being a shanty town as planning would be " interesting". 

I've seen this though. Was it on Simon Reeves series on Scandinavia?

 

The value of the plot could be interesting, as it would be fully serviced and the developer could calculate this any which way.

You've got me thinking though.

[ProDave]

There have been a few developments around here, all small scale, where a number of plots were sold individually for self build.  Yes it can take a while before they are all finished, but generally the results are good.

 

If this link works  https://maps.app.goo.gl/S3TDGbpQvWBsd7a59

 

All the houses to the west of that point were sold as individual plots, I wired one of those as a new build, and another when they extended into the loft.  These are the detached houses around a green.

 

The houses to the east of that point were all built by a developer.

 

Guess which end of the street I would prefer to live.

 

[Post and beam]

Milton Keynes people.

 

Part of the reason Milton Keynes exists is to make available serviced plots of land for self builders. There are hundreds of them in MK. The local authority in charge obviously has a different mindset and has done for very many years. 

Now, whether you want to live in MK is a different question but the point is, this is not a new idea and it has been done ( is being done). Why the idea has never really spread is beyond me.

[MPx]

To me the barriers are many fold:

Finding an affordable plot in a place you'd want to live

Finding an Architect who is on the same wavelength

Getting through the broken planning systems - including paying for endless reports by "experts"

Dealing with endless planning conditions

Dealing with endless Building Control issues

Finding out enough to make an appropriate choice on construction method

Finding a builder and/or trades competent in their work, affordable, and available

Having to make many many decisions on little information and only idealised drawings for reference

Lead time from initial idea to moving in date measured in several years.

 

Or you can just put up with the utter c**p thrown up by the nationals and shortcut the whole thing to a few months.

 

[Indy]

Town and Country planning act of 1947. Fix that and all the other dominos will fall.

[ToughButterCup]

On 25/08/2026 at 10:31, Matt Perkins said:

...

I would love your feedback on a concept I'm developing to make self-build and custom builds more accessible and easier. 

...

 

Your idea isn't simple enough. 

Others above have - between them - listed many of the barriers to entry into the self build sector. 

 

Solve any single one of them , and you're in business. 

[SteamyTea]

Why do people think that self building a home is cheaper, and better, that getting professionals to do it.

Just imagine what carnage there would be on the roads if people built their own bicycles from components, let alone a motorbike or car.

[Oz07]

A lot of Australian housing is serviced plots sold by land developers who build roads and infrastructure. Then builders have a number of home designs people can choose to have built on the plot or customise the design or even go bespoke. Obviously all differing costs. It does end up very low density and needing cars though which is not ideal. 

[Gus Potter]

On 25/08/2026 at 10:31, Matt Perkins said:

I would love your feedback on a concept I'm developing to make self-build and custom builds more accessible and easier.

Your proposal invites discussion, that in itself is healthy. 

On 25/08/2026 at 10:31, Matt Perkins said:

My intention is not to market or advertise this, simply to gather some valuable feedback from self and custom-build enthusiasts like your good selves

I think it's fair for you to ask the question, most of us on BH won't take a negative view of this as you are exploring if you can benefit the self build market, and if you can make a living out of it and a bit of money then your are justified, a fair days pay for fair work. 

 

Here is bit of context and bit of my background. The first 20 or so years of my career were spent being a builder, some of that was building houses for self builders. I had generally 6 -8  full time staff then sub contractors. Depending on the time of year I may only have had four subbies, then at times up to about twenty folk working on one site. To keep them all working I would normally run one big project and say a couple of extensions, attic conversions at the same time. This allowed me to manage resources, deal with changes, cash flow, maybe planning and BC delays. You should be pretty familiar with how this works given your background. 

 

When I got to near 40 I could see the writing on the wall personally. My wife and I parted, my German Shephard died and I was left living in my lovely self build on my own with this huge weight on my neck of the business and my duty to my employees. I shut the business, paid all my staff the redundancy, phoned my competitors, told them I was chucking in the towel and pleaded for them to take my lads on. Some did! Now I also squared up all my builders merchants.. some told me, even my accountant.. you are limited Gus, if you walk away you'll be at least £100 - 200kk better off. But I paid the money as I knew my personal reputation can't be valued. Now I was lucky as I sold everything just before the 2008 crash. 

 

I then trucked off to university to become a Structural Engineer, graduated, trained and now my consultancy is in October this year going to celebrate it's tenth anniversary. But part of my success is my contacts from the old days! I am still in contact with my old suppliers, they give me names of good creditable builders, as they remember I squared them all up. One of my ex employees is now a BC officer in my local area, his wife, who used to inspect some of my project is now a Senior in BC. They are consummate professionals and remember me as "not a chancer". 

 

In summary, my own view is that if you want to build a sustainable business in the construction industry it's going to take 5 years living on the edge, another three years to stabilise, it's really only in the last couple of years that I've felt I've arrived, lots of repeat business and a huge amount of experience under my belt now.. 40 years!

 

Ok, the above is not a rant.. it's intended to let you see there is no fast buck here in the construction industry. Developing an app is not going to work long term, unless you have lots of contacts and an already established business that brings in the bread and butter. 

 

Let's say you are digitising and facilitating via an app the procurement and build process, that's just using modern tech, the game remains the same and the profit loss sheet still stacks up the way it pretty much has over the last 40 years. The tek has changed, but the fundamental principle of turn over is vanity, profit is sanity has not changed, you may also want ( I suspect you may not) but just look at Ruskin the common law of business. 

 

But the bottom line is that it looks like you want to project manage, use your QS skills.. with a fancy app. To make a living out of this, you need do the basics very well, get repeat business, you'll need to have lots of contacts, cash in the bank, be legitimate, have insurance etc, and be very good at what you do to be able to justify your 10%, your app ain't going to cut the mustard, the app is your potential cream, your USP that delivers that extra profit. 

 

I think you need to have look at your business model in term of the app. But if that stacks up for you then it would be welcomed by not least myself and folk on BH. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Mr Punter]

 

On 25/08/2026 at 10:31, Matt Perkins said:

real gap in the market for the average person to choose a custom build over the boring generic new build developments churned out by the big housebuilders. 

 

There are lots of smaller developers who do less formulaic developments.  It is not just a choice between Taylor Wimpey and self-build.  If you were able to offer fully serviced plots with OPP similar to Graven Hill you may find a market.

[Gus Potter]

In the"old days" A first time self builder with no experience could save at least 15% on the build cost of a house. Now in the old days the market was rising, thus the value of the property also increased by on average, say 10%, over say a 2 year build time. You had to be a complete idiot to lose money on a self build. So even if you were not that good your self build could return a tax free return of up 25%, but nine times out of ten you would not lose your shirt. 

 

The market has changed a lot. 

 

@saveasteading who has decades of experience pointed out.. and I agree, much of the profit for the volume builders now lies in the land transaction, the actual building of the houses are not the main profit element, the house building is just a means to and end, basically a bit of a hassle!

 

Now if you buy a serviced plot on one of these serviced schemes, the seller (developer) has already taken off the cream of the profit, you as a self building then are looking at marginal profit, but carry much more risk.  Self building in this case is not going to make you lots of money, it may give you the house you love though and if that has value for you then it's viable.

 

Now say you do a house that sells for 300k. You'll be lucky to clear 20k after all the taxes etc if you sell it on , if your motive is to make money, you'll have to risk dealing with a builder, a huge amount of personal time.. etc.. the reality is you are likely to be better off if you just do a Saturday morning shift in Aldi, you may even get a pension contribution!

 

I've had the good fortune to talk and meet with @Square Feet who has some ideas about how we get back to making self building more attractive, not least financially. It's early stage ideas, will take time to develop, but looks promising. 

 

The reality at the moment is for your average self builder the financial risks are high vs the rewards. There are still a good few very well off self builders who don't really mind if they make money of not.  But the whole idea is to encourage young folk to self build and improve their financial health which results from their own hard work.  But as above.. it really is the case.. you are better off at times doing a Saturday shift at Aldi!

Edited 18 hours ago by Gus Potter

[saveasteading]

The only self build I would recommend as financially advantageous  to amateurs is renovation. 

Something tired but functional. Then don't remodel it but just bring it up to date with lots of diy.

Conversion may be more advantageous with the VAT benefit, but not if there are major works to structure.

[Indy]

Painfully true. When I started this process 5 years ago - there was still a sliver of a chance that we would come a little bit ahead - i.e. about 10% profit if we decided to sell at the end. It was never intended to be a flip for profit, but doing the math at least keeps you sane when sinking your life savings, blood, sweat and tears into something.  

 

A whole host of things since then have happened which means there is no chance I would make the money back if I was to sell it now. The market turned, materials went up, labour went up, we up-specced the material choices (🤨), mansion tax coming and general taxation levels going through the roof. 

 

I could easily have bought something of a similar size in decent nick for cheaper than it's been to do the work myself. But, it would have still needed a lot of work to get it up to the right standard and not been exactly what I wanted - so here we are. 

 

Will definitely need to live here for at least 10-15 years to stand a chance of the markets recovering and us being able to recover our funds. Luckily, that's the plan anyway 😄

[Square Feet]

9 hours ago, Gus Potter said:

I've had the good fortune to talk and meet with @Square Feet who has some ideas about how we get back to making self building more attractive, not least financially. It's early stage ideas, will take time to develop, but looks promising. 

Great to meet you too Gus. My head is still buzzing with ideas. 

 

As others have said above - I don't think the problem is lack of imagination on the part of the would-be self builders. For most of us it's lack of understanding or knowledge that holds us back, which is why a forum like this is so valuable. I do also think that YouTube channels have a major part to play in taking the fear out of the unknown by demonstrating just how something can be done and how much it costs, but I get that we don't punt those too much in here as they can be commercial. 

 

We all used to be able to create shelter for ourselves and our families and would be able to do so again in a world with access to cheap land and no regs to worry about. Part of the problem in this country I think is the prevalence (particularly in England) of brick and mortar for building material - a method that involves trades straight away. 

 

Walter Segal pioneered a method of building that involved no wet trades whatsoever and in doing so inspired a generation of self builders - even if they didn't use his methods in the end. His method is woefully short of what is required for current insulation and air-tightness regs but still has merit in its core principles and vision of empowerment and enablement of ordinary people to build for themselves. 

 

A few years ago I built a workshop out of pallets. The only non-pallet parts were the rafters and roofing sheets. Standing back and looking at the finished building I realised that the entire load of the roof structure was being held up by a few nails in the pallets. This then started a conversation in my head regarding structural stability and so on and expanded into thinking about how a bigger structure could be constructed. It stayed up fine and the workshop stood for 14 years until it was demolished to make way for an extension. 

 

I'd say if you want to build a house - start by designing a shed and work upwards. 

[Post and beam]

On the flip side, the frustrations and problems that we find when self building were not a barrier to me.

Not through any skill or intelligence but rather total ignorance. I started the build with what i thought was a budget and a plan. I suspect many people are in this position when and if they start a project to build. So i dont think its as much of a barrier as you might imagine.

Reality struck once we were past the point of no return and we had sold our old house to fund the new. Then the issues just become things you have to deal with.

 

As it happens i lucked into a good plot that i did not have to pay the commercial going rate for. This is because it was/is Leasehold with a lost freeholder.  

so, build a house in a field, live in it for a year and apply to have the lease converted to freehold. Pay the government a large wedge of cash and bingo you have a freehold property worth whatever a house of that size should be worth on the open market. 

I recognise that this is a very rare and lucky set of circumstances that will have a financial benefit.  It illustrates that it can be done.

[Ed_]

25 minutes ago, Square Feet said:

I don't think the problem is lack of imagination on the part of the would-be self builders. For most of us it's lack of understanding or knowledge that holds us back, which is why a forum like this is so valuable.

I'd say confidence is a big issue, most self builders are doing it for the first time and spending their life savings. This leads you to stick to what is known/common which is very often what is used by volume builders. One advantage of self building should be to build bespoke to the situation and to use innovative ideas that haven't reached or aren't suitable for the volume builders; leveraging the experience of others (e.g. this forum) is crucial.

 

Another thing I have found is that you have to try and understand everything yourself. Any professional you employ, no matter how good, has a different set of incentives (being paid, maximising profit, reducing their risk) which are different to your own, you need to try to be an intelligent customer. Easier said than done.

 

31 minutes ago, Square Feet said:

Walter Segal pioneered a method of building that involved no wet trades whatsoever

I'm still amazed that no one has invented a better way to finish an internal wall than to throw wet muck at it and smooth it over! Probably they have but big plaster has shut them down.

[SteamyTea]

48 minutes ago, Ed_ said:

I'm still amazed that no one has invented a better way to finish an internal wall than to throw wet muck at it and smooth it over

They have for bathrooms.

[saveasteading]

53 minutes ago, Ed_ said:

a different set of incentives

add to that their own preferences, prejudices, and making it interesting for themselves more than for you.

[Indy]

3 hours ago, Post and beam said:

On the flip side, the frustrations and problems that we find when self building were not a barrier to me.

Not through any skill or intelligence but rather total ignorance. I started the build with what i thought was a budget and a plan. I suspect many people are in this position when and if they start a project to build. So i dont think its as much of a barrier as you might imagine.

Reality struck once we were past the point of no return and we had sold our old house to fund the new. Then the issues just become things you have to deal with.

 

As it happens i lucked into a good plot that i did not have to pay the commercial going rate for. This is because it was/is Leasehold with a lost freeholder.  

so, build a house in a field, live in it for a year and apply to have the lease converted to freehold. Pay the government a large wedge of cash and bingo you have a freehold property worth whatever a house of that size should be worth on the open market. 

I recognise that this is a very rare and lucky set of circumstances that will have a financial benefit.  It illustrates that it can be done.

 

It's great to hear the good luck you had. But luck is not a mass market solution and your unique set of circumstances clearly cannot be scaled - which is kinda the point. 

[saveasteading]

3 hours ago, Ed_ said:

invented a better way to finish an internal wall than to throw wet muck at it and smooth it over! Probably they have but

I had a summer job scraping manure out of the internal joints in an old rural stone building.

Guessing it had been there 100 or more years.

It was very effective material. 

 

Ahh not that kind of muck?.

But everything we use is made of treated ground or dead trees.

Even the modern materials are oil based, so dead algae remains and packed out with some sand.

 

It's all we've got!

[Great_scot_selfbuild]

3 hours ago, Ed_ said:

I'm still amazed that no one has invented a better way to finish an internal wall than to throw wet muck at it and smooth it over! Probably they have but big plaster has shut them down.

This. (I agree with so many points already made, but this made me laugh at its accuracy - thanks @Ed_)

[Roger440]

5 hours ago, Square Feet said:

Great to meet you too Gus. My head is still buzzing with ideas. 

 

As others have said above - I don't think the problem is lack of imagination on the part of the would-be self builders. For most of us it's lack of understanding or knowledge that holds us back, which is why a forum like this is so valuable. I do also think that YouTube channels have a major part to play in taking the fear out of the unknown by demonstrating just how something can be done and how much it costs, but I get that we don't punt those too much in here as they can be commercial. 

 

We all used to be able to create shelter for ourselves and our families and would be able to do so again in a world with access to cheap land and no regs to worry about. Part of the problem in this country I think is the prevalence (particularly in England) of brick and mortar for building material - a method that involves trades straight away. 

 

Walter Segal pioneered a method of building that involved no wet trades whatsoever and in doing so inspired a generation of self builders - even if they didn't use his methods in the end. His method is woefully short of what is required for current insulation and air-tightness regs but still has merit in its core principles and vision of empowerment and enablement of ordinary people to build for themselves. 

 

A few years ago I built a workshop out of pallets. The only non-pallet parts were the rafters and roofing sheets. Standing back and looking at the finished building I realised that the entire load of the roof structure was being held up by a few nails in the pallets. This then started a conversation in my head regarding structural stability and so on and expanded into thinking about how a bigger structure could be constructed. It stayed up fine and the workshop stood for 14 years until it was demolished to make way for an extension. 

 

I'd say if you want to build a house - start by designing a shed and work upwards. 

 

Its not any lack of understanding or knowledge holding things back. Its simple, practical issues, like land availability, planning, and most important now (more than in the past) is that it makes no financial sense in most of the country.

 

Its not uncommon to spend several 10's thousands on "stuff" that has nothing to do with actually building, but more to do with lining other peoples pockets for reports, surveys, etc etc. I saw a report recently that "stuff" was adding £76k per hhouse in costs, on average, across the UK. Dont know how accurate the number is, but its a lot, regardless.

 

I long harboured a dream to self build, but my first 2 points scuppered any hope, before i even got the the "does it make financial sense" bit.

 

Saveasteadings point that the only sensible way now is a light renovation. Which, having thrown in the towel on self build is essentially what im doing. Will it be nice when its done, yes. Will it be what i really wanted, absolutely not.

 

Beyond project management, which has its place, though not for me, im really not clear what you are offering. Being blunt, sounds like another "cost" thats adds little if anything to the task of getting a house built. Maybe ive misunderstood?