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.
