Building 2 houses at 20!

[greatdane]

Hello all

I am currently 20, working at an investment bank in LA for year( until June 07) and then returning back home to the UK. I have however been planning on doing some little entrepreneural things when i get back and have started doing some early research. My situation is this. I have when i get back,some land available to be developed where i live, Nottingham, in a good area where 4/5 bedroom houses on the street are valued at around 350/500k (some are more). I have 1/2 acre to play with, which i have worked out you could build 2, 4 bedroom houses on with garage etc, with reasonable garden.

Now, assuming all planning permision has been granted(this i have found out should not be a problem) what would the building costs of a 4 bed house with garage be roughly. I estimate £200k per house inclusive of all costs and including room for potential extra costs.
Would this be a reasonable figure to use when doing a preliminary plan?

I would appreciate any ideas or opinions on this subject.

[Sam_68]

It very much depends on the size and specification of the houses, but yes, £200K per house is a reasonable initial ballpark figure.

Ironically, you may encounter resistance from Planning because you are only intending to build 2 houses on 1/2 an acre! Current government guidance (a document called Planning Policy Guidance Note 3 - PPG3) says that, because of the housing shortage, Local Authorities should be discouraging underdevelopment of residential land and sets a minimum density of 30 dwellings per hectare, which works out at about 12 units per acre. On a half acre site, you should therefore be planning to build at least half a dozen houses!

Design of speculative housing developments is what I do for a living, and Nottingham is bang in the middle of my patch, so if you someone to undertake the design and/or statutory approvals on your project, e-mail me via my profile.

[greatdane]

Thanks for that. I have considered building a few properties on it and financially that would probably be the most rewarding. I thought that getting permission for such development would be the biggest issue however if the government are trying to encourage more development it gives me another option to think about. Thanks for your help anyway and when i get back to the UK ill drop you an email to discuss it further.
C

[ysnnim]

As a basic rule of thumb...for 'back of a fag packet' costings for an average house, build costs are £1000 per sq metre.

(however build costs may go up or down, as can pretty much every thing else in life)

D

[ScottNicol]

i build houses for about £600 per square metre

[Sam_68]

Build costs can vary wildly, depending on quality of materials and specification, complexity of design, abnormals costs and how the project is managed, so I'd be very wary of saying 'It'll cost you £X per square metre to build'.

I could tell you the range of cost per square metre of our 4 bed houses, but there wouldn't be much point because you won't be able to get anywhere close to the discount buying power, economy of scale or carefully refined cost management of one of the country's biggest housebuilders, so it would be meaningless! Given that you are new to the game and are only building a handful of houses, though, £1000 per square is a lot more realistic than £600 per square metre.

Also, at risk of stating the obvious, you need to know how big the houses will be before you can even attempt to work out a rough cost on the basis of £ per square metre. Typically, speculative, developer-built 4 bedroom detached houses range between around 1000 square feet (93m2) and 2,200 square feet (204m2), but it will depend on the local market and the specific site.

[vex]

If you are looking at the family or luxury end of the market then both myself and Plotloss can help give that product differentation (spelling) by offering simple, cost effective network for Music, Data, TV and Telephone as well as moodlighting and home automation.

Happy to chat on or off line.

Chris

[rsvmilly]

ScottNicol said:

i build houses for about £600 per square metre

What size site? How many dwellings?

Does that include prelims, design fees, stats, site costs? Or is that for the bare house?

[martin hunt]

vex,

I am about to start work on building a house and am looking at the whole enronment management and network as well as VA distribution, is there sucha system (like hotels use) where i can have 1 sky box but dtermine what channels each TV can have access to?

Regards

Martin

[Plotloss]

The only way to do it I believe would be to PIN Lock the channels that you didnt want global access to in the Skybox.

I *think* you can do this with Sky, not 100% though, will do some research.

[blanc]

ScottNicol said:

i build houses for about £600 per square metre

That seems very cheap compared to what I'm used to. What kind of house?

[ScottNicol]

Sorry just realised i should have added more, we build roughly 100 per year.

The price is for the price of the house from start to finish inc sanitry ware and kitchens, the type of house is timber framed kits. We are in scotland and everyone basically now uses them up here.

That price is from a main contractor and its wot nearly all our developments are done at , and the spec is good enough to kit out houses upto around 400k

[ScottNicol]

Oh and to the original poster, good luck, i started this when i was 18 and im now 22, so it can be done at a young age, just employ the correct people.

[greatdane]

Thanks for the info. Obviously the cost issue isnt something you can just give a single figure for and i can see people here have varying experiences with how much they believe the cost of building a house is. There are so many variables to consider that can affect the cost, it sure makes it very interesting and one reason why i would consider going into property development as a future career, although private banking is at the moment very appealing.

I also have plans for a development in Poland, i have some land there and intend to do something with it. Its in a great location and therefore i should make the most of it. However doing business in Poland can be a very tricky. I have Polish family and friends and i have heard of many dodgy stories. Again though, would be a fun project.

Thanks again

C

[ScottNicol]

can i ask how you came across ownership of this land ? did you go out intentially to buy it to develop on ? was it passed onto you through your family ? land aint easy to come across these days !

[johnfm]

ScottNicol said:

can i ask how you came across ownership of this land ? did you go out intentially to buy it to develop on ? was it passed onto you through your family ? land aint easy to come across these days !

I know what you mean - decent plots for the small developer in decent areas are not common. I think its a lot different for the big boys with their huge land banks waiting for planning to build yet another bland 'Brookside' estate.

[Sam_68]

johnfm said:

I think its a lot different for the big boys with their huge land banks...

If only that were true!!

[ScottNicol]

that is certainly not true !! although there is some names that flood into my head that have very good landbanks.

what type of development are people into and how many units do you guys build ?

[johnfm]

I'm very small scale - 'part time' really. Building a terrace of three x 2beds in a town near Matlock, renovating a big detached in Harrogate.

[qwertyford]

From reading them Home Rennovation and building type magazines, I kinda got the idea that for for every pound spent including land and build etc, the property is valued at roughly twice that in a self build. This was just a rough trend I noticed but it ranged from £100k investment with the house being valued at £200k after the build and also for houses as expensive as £1million.

I however, have no idea on building houses or anything of the sort. The overall impression I got was that it is pretty stressful but the end result is really rewarding.