Great News?

It’s been four years since we started this blog, documenting our journey to find land for our next self-build. We’ve made offers on around seven different opportunities—some barns with Class Q permission, others parcels of land for ground-up builds. Each offer was based on an anticipated equity gain of 15-20%, yet all were unsuccessful. In many cases we were outbid by offers we estimate would result in no equity gain. Other times, if the site could accommodate multiple builds, our offer for a portion was rejected in favour of a developer taking on the entire site.

Expecting an equity gain is reasonable to protect against an over spend or change in market values, but it’s also an reasonable reward since we’ll be managing the project ourselves and handling much of the first and second fix work.

We have been Living in rented housing for the past four years while our kids grow up isn’t the dream we envisioned, but it’s been necessary since we sold our home in 2020 keeping our capital ready to pounce on a self build. Given the energy drain of failing we’ve thought about buying a standard house to settle for the children, but given our commitment thus far we’d feel defeated and deflated.

The great news? We had an offer rejected exactly a year back for a barn, and we have just been asked if it still stands, we said yes! On RightMove it is now marked SSTC. Ahead we have all the due diligence to go through, and so many questions particular to the site but also how we should build to understand the full costs. Immediately we need to onboard a technical architect, make our tweaks through planning and submit to building regs. It’s almost November, having done this before believe if we start in March we can be watertight by summer.

In parallel to a technical architect and using an quantity estimator service, we can test local prices by engaging a ground worker, brick layers and roofer, as they will be the first skills on site. The roof cost is of particular interest, it totals 288sqm and has fourteen existing skylights. The ambition is to complete by end of January.

The next step; there happens to be a build show this Friday in Harrogate, we plan to visit to see if the experts at the show can help us find answers on several topics; Class Q, making the best of waterlogged land, geothermal drilling costs, structural options, design quirks. I expect this will be the next blog post.