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The Strategic Land Group is a specialist land promotion company. That means we will secure planning permission for your land on your behalf at our cost and risk. Our fee is a share of the value of the site once it is sold – so if we don’t succeed, it doesn’t cost you anything.
Here’s what working with The Strategic Land Group is like on a typical housing project.
Our first step is to review your site to understand what development potential it may have. We consider a variety of sources like the council’s local development plan (and any replacement they’re working on) and investigate issues like transport infrastructure, flood risk, ecology and house prices.
That initial review is free of charge and without any obligation to you. In fact, if you’ve received a letter from us saying we think your site has potential, then we’ve done that work already.
With our assessment complete, we’ll explain your site’s potential to you and outline how we would go about trying to secure planning permission.
If you’re happy with our intended approach, we’ll prepare a formal proposal for you to consider. This will explain our tailor-made planning strategy, and set out our commercial terms.
Those terms vary depending on the costs, risks and timescales associated with each site, but they will always include three key elements:
• A time period for us to secure planning permission.
• A fixed fee payable to you on the day we enter into a legal agreement, that is yours to keep no matter what.
• Our share of the site’s eventual selling price.
We’ll discuss any questions you might have and, if you agree, instruct solicitors to produce a formal promotion agreement. You’re free to appoint any solicitor you like, or we can recommend one - either way, we’ll pay your legal fees so it doesn’t cost you anything.
With the legal agreement in place, we’ll start work promoting your site. Although you’ll already know how we intend to do this, we’ll prepare a more detailed planning strategy for you. This will include details like the specialist consultant team who will be working alongside us on matters like transport, ecology, drainage and landscape impacts. You’ll have time to consider that strategy and ask us questions before confirming that you’re happy with it.
We’ll then work with the consultant team to produce the technical reports we’ll need, and to prepare a masterplan showing how the site could be developed. The main purpose of the masterplan is to prove to the council that the site can deliver a high-quality housing development. Later, it will be used by developers interested in buying the site as the basis of their own detailed designs. As it’s an important part of the process, we’ll discuss and agree it with you before we submit it the council.
In most cases, we’ll be looking to convince the council to allocate your site for housing development in a new local development plan, before submitting a planning application.
Using the technical information we’ve gathered, we’ll show the council that your site is suitable for development. We’ll also respond to formal consultations on the local plan to ensure that the council are planning to deliver the right number of new homes and in the right settlements.
You can find out more about how we use the local plan process to secure planning permission here.
We will keep you informed with regular written updates and review meetings and will be available on the phone if you ever want to call to check on progress.
With planning permission in place, the next stage is to find a developer to buy the site. In order to maximise your site’s value, we will prepare a detailed information pack to show that the site is shovel-ready – something developers are prepared to pay a premium for.
An experienced land agent with knowledge of the local area will be instructed to widely market the site for sale. By instructing the agent jointly with you – but at our cost – the agent will owe the same legal duty of care to you as they do us.
When bids are received, we carefully review them to make sure all the information we provided has been taken into account. The highest bidders are invited to an interview to discuss their proposals, before asking them to prepare “best and final” offers which are as free from caveats as possible.
This ensures the offers are genuine, and reduces the chance of the developer trying to renegotiate the price at a later date.
We will advise you which offer we think should be accepted and then negotiate a legal sale agreement with the developer – keeping both you and your solicitor updated throughout.
You can learn more about how to sell land to developers here.
We’ve been working successfully with landowners in this way for many years. Here’s what some of them have had to say about their experiences:
“My dad originally bought the land and always hoped it may get planning but having seen the hoops one needs to jump through now I realise we could not have achieved it without professional help. Thank you.”
JS, Landowner
“We would all like to thank you for the long period of work that you have put in to get this sale to completion. We owe you a great deal, especially for your persistence.”
NG, Landowner
“A big thank you to you and your team for all your efforts and hard work in generating a good outcome and providing us with very useful updates along the way.”
SW, Landowner
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