Category: New Homes

A lot of my work involves looking at new-build developments from the other side of the table, from pricing to how plots and schemes get positioned before they reach a buyer. It means I probably look at a show home differently to most buyers because I see how much of what you experience on a visit has been built to create a particular impression.

That’s not a criticism. It’s just worth knowing, because it changes what’s worth paying close attention to.

Why Two Identical House Types Can Have Very Different Prices

Walking a development, it’s easy to assume price differences between plots are roughly proportional to size, or come down to which one you prefer. In the pricing work I do, it’s rarely that simple.

Garden size, aspect, position relative to other plots, whether it backs onto open space or another house, and even the view from the rear windows are all things I factor into plot-by-plot pricing.

That’s useful to know as a buyer because the premium you’re asked to pay for a plot usually has a reason behind it, even if nobody explains it. It’s worth asking why one plot costs meaningfully more than a similar one nearby. Often there’s a good reason. Sometimes there isn’t, and that’s worth knowing before you commit.

Incentives Are Usually Protecting the Asking Price, Not Softening It

One thing I see consistently in how new-build schemes are sold is that developers strongly prefer offering incentives – upgraded specification, flooring packages or a contribution towards costs – over reducing the headline price.

There’s a good commercial reason for that. Every sale on a development sets a reference point for the next one, and for future resales, so protecting the headline figure helps protect the value of every other home on the site.

For a buyer, that means it’s worth looking at the whole deal rather than focusing only on the asking price. Flooring, upgraded specification or a contribution towards costs all have real value, but work out what they’re actually worth to you and weigh that against the price you’re paying, rather than thinking the number on the board is the whole conversation.

The Show Home Plot Is Often Chosen for Logistics, Not Just Looks

It’s easy to assume the show home is simply the developer’s best plot, picked to set a flattering tone for the rest of the site. Just as often, it comes down to the build programme.

A show home needs to finish early and sit on a safe route that avoids the active building site, often a plot near the entrance or on a completed early phase, not necessarily the one with the best garden or aspect.

The plot on show and the plot with your name on it are two different things, so it’s worth asking directly what differs between the showcase plot and your own, rather than assuming one tells you much about the other.

The Show Home Can’t Fix Decisions Made Long Before It Was Dressed

This is the point I’d weigh most heavily. Floor plans, room sizes, bedroom mix, parking and garden size are set at the planning stage, long before paint colours or staging furniture. By the time a show home opens, those decisions are locked in.

A well-dressed show home can make a layout feel more generous than it will day to day, for the twenty minutes you’re standing in it with someone else’s furniture doing the work.

So it’s worth looking past the styling to what doesn’t change once you move in: how the rooms flow, where the storage is, and whether the parking and garden are genuinely usable rather than just present. Those are the things you’ll still be living with long after the show home furniture and sales flags have disappeared.

What Else Is Coming, and What That Means for You

This is somewhere I can add real value because I spend a lot of time looking at planning applications, development sites and land.

I’d want to understand the planning history of the development itself, whether the current phase is part of a larger consent, and what later phases could contain.

I’d also look at what’s happening on neighbouring land, whether anything nearby is allocated for development, being promoted through the local plan, or already has an application in for more homes.

A view across open countryside feels very different if that same land already has permission, or is likely to get it, for more homes.

It’s worth thinking too about future new-build competition, since that affects price and how long a resale takes. Planning applications and allocations are public information, and it’s a far more useful conversation to have before you buy than after.

If I were buying a new-build home tomorrow, I’d spend far less time in the show home, and more time asking about the specific plot: why it’s priced the way it is, what genuinely differs from the plot on show, and what’s already committed for the wider site.

The show home tells you what the developer wants you to feel. The plot, the planning history and what’s happening around it tell you what you’re actually buying.

One thing the land work I’ve been doing recently has really reinforced for me is how misleading GDV can be on its own. It’s an important number, but it doesn’t tell you what the land itself is worth, and I’ve seen that in a few recent appraisals where small changes to the assumptions underneath it produced very different answers.

A good chunk of my work involves looking at viability from the developer’s side, working out what a scheme can support once build costs, fees, finance and risk are factored in. Two schemes with the same GDV can land on very different residual values depending on what’s underneath them.

The Build Cost Assumption That Changes Everything

I worked recently on a small backland site – a couple of plots behind an existing property, nothing overly complicated in planning terms. The sales side was straightforward: two similar houses with a comparable local market to price against, giving a combined gross value of a little over £600,000. On paper, it looked like a site worth pursuing at the guide price being asked.

Where it got interesting was the build cost. The first pass used a fairly standard floor area assumption, and at that size the numbers came out negative. Refining that assumption – not the design, not the sales value, just a more accurate read of what was actually going to be built – turned the same site from a loss into a residual land value comfortably above the asking price.

What surprised me was how much difference that one assumption made. Nothing about the site had changed. One input, corrected, moved the answer by close to £200,000.

That’s the part that’s easy to miss. The GDV is usually the straightforward half of the calculation. It’s the build costs, fees, finance and margin underneath it where the real work and uncertainty sit.

Why More Homes Doesn’t Always Mean More Land Value

I’ve also worked on a site with planning consent already in place for a modest scheme: five houses, low risk and a known quantity. There was a case for going back in for a larger scheme instead – seven or eight units on the same footprint – which on paper pushed the gross value up by around a third. On paper, the larger scheme looked like the obvious answer.

Once I worked through the rest of it, it wasn’t quite that simple. That uplift came with a cost that doesn’t show up in a GDV figure: giving up a live consent, applying afresh, and carrying twelve to eighteen months of planning risk with no guarantee of the same outcome.

Once that risk and time were priced in, the uplift in land value was real but noticeably smaller than the uplift in GDV. The bigger scheme still came out ahead, just nowhere near a third more valuable.

Planning Certainty Is Worth More Than People Expect

The clearest example of this is smaller and simpler: a couple of self-build plots without planning permission, in a spot with genuine appeal but no consent secured.

Sold as they were, that land would have achieved a modest sum per plot. Securing outline planning consent first – costing a small fraction of the eventual uplift – roughly doubled what each plot could achieve.

Nothing about the land itself had changed. What changed was certainty. A buyer paying for a plot with consent in hand is paying to remove risk, not just to acquire ground. It’s easy to underestimate how much value sits in resolving uncertainty before you go to market, rather than after.

Why More Deals Now Get Structured, Rather Than Simply Sold

Build costs, labour and planning have all moved the wrong way for viability over the past few years, which is part of why option and promotion agreements come up in a lot of these conversations now.

Rather than a developer paying for unconsented land upfront and carrying all the planning risk alone, an option lets both sides agree the price mechanism now and complete once planning is secured. It’s often a more realistic route to a deal happening than holding out for a cash sale at a number that quietly assumes the risk away.

What This Means If You’re the One Holding the Land

None of this means land is worth less than people hope. It means the honest answer to “what’s my land worth?” is closer to “it depends what someone can build, what that costs, how much risk they’re taking on, and how sure they can be of the outcome” than a single number or a percentage of GDV.

A residual value that looks low at first pass can look very different once the assumptions behind it are tested properly, and a generous headline GDV can shrink fast once real costs and risks are priced in honestly.

If someone gives you a GDV or a development figure, it’s worth asking what’s actually been assumed underneath it: what sales values, what build costs, what planning position, and what time, risk and developer return have been factored in.

Knowing the GDV is useful. Understanding what’s assumed underneath it tells you far more about what the site can actually support.

I’ve spent a good chunk of the last few months working through pricing, GDVs and comparable evidence on a handful of residential schemes, and the same thing keeps coming up: bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better value.

The biggest houses on a site will usually sell for more in cash terms. That part isn’t surprising. But once you look at the price per square foot, how deep the buyer pool actually is, and what real comparable evidence supports, the picture changes quite a bit.

The Middle of the Range Often Does the Most Work

One scheme I priced recently, in Childs Ercall, a small village in Shropshire, had a genuinely wide spread of house types on one site, from two-bedroom homes up to a handful of large five-bedroom detached houses.

Going into the pricing, I assumed the biggest houses would carry the strongest numbers. They didn’t.

Once I’d built the pricing from proper local evidence, the three-bedroom homes came out with the strongest price per square foot on the whole scheme, comfortably ahead of the four-bedroom units and a long way ahead of the five-bedroom homes, despite the five-bed being the most expensive individual sale on paper.

A nearby comparable made the same point even more clearly: a genuinely large house, close to 4,000 square feet, had sold at a rate per square foot roughly half what the three-bed homes on my scheme were achieving. Past a certain size, the pool of people who can actually buy those homes shrinks, and the market simply won’t pay proportionally more for the extra space.

I think that’s worth knowing before a unit mix gets locked into a planning application, not after. If a scheme leans heavily on its biggest house types because bigger feels like it should mean more valuable, the evidence I keep coming across suggests the mid-sized homes are often the ones doing more of the heavy lifting for the scheme overall.

More Units Doesn’t Automatically Mean a Better Outcome

I’ve also modelled a site in Romsley, Worcestershire, two different ways: a smaller scheme on part of the site, and a larger one extended across the whole plot at close to double the unit count.

On paper, the larger version produced close to double the headline GDV simply because there were more units to sell.

But GDV on its own doesn’t tell you what you need to know. When I checked both scenarios against the market, including a national housebuilder scheme selling nearby, it was clear the local catchment already had a fair amount of competing stock, and three-bedroom homes in that area were taking an average of over four months to go under offer.

Doubling the unit count meant putting a lot more of the same product into a market that hadn’t shown it could absorb it quickly. The bigger scheme wasn’t wrong, but the headline GDV uplift didn’t automatically mean a proportionally stronger or lower-risk outcome. That’s the bit that actually needs testing properly before anyone commits to it, rather than assumed from the unit count alone.

Where Stamp Duty Genuinely Changes the Answer

This isn’t something I’d flag on every scheme, but on one I priced only last week, the top plot sat right around the £995,000 mark, which matters because stamp duty steps up from 5% to 10% on everything above that threshold.

Market evidence in the area showed homes above £1m sitting unsold for 200 or more days. Rather than pushing that plot as high as the specification could arguably justify, the sensible call was to price it cautiously around the threshold and check the buyer profile before going any higher.

It’s a good reminder that a buyer isn’t only weighing square footage and bedroom count against their budget. They’re weighing the whole cost of the purchase.

What I Keep Coming Back To

What the work I’ve done recently has reinforced for me is that there isn’t a simple formula. Bigger sells for more in absolute terms, and more units mean a bigger number on the GDV summary, but neither of those things automatically means better value or a stronger scheme.

The question I keep asking myself on each one is whether we’re starting with what fits on the site, or with who’s actually going to buy it.

Bedroom mix, room sizes, parking and density – a lot of that gets decided early, often before anyone has tested it properly against the real buyer at that price point and what they’ve actually shown they’re willing to pay. By the time a scheme reaches planning, most of that is locked in and expensive to change.

I’d rather have that conversation early, while there’s still room to shift the mix if the evidence points somewhere different, than find out after planning that the numbers don’t quite add up in the way the site plan suggested they would.