About Castle Green Homes
Castle Green Homes is a regional homebuilder that’s expanded from its North Wales heartland to the North West of England, adding hundreds of units to its land portfolio since rebranding from Macbryde Homes in 2020.
The company rebrand followed a management buyout led by chief executive Gwyn Jones, backed by long-term finance partner Bridgemere UK.
Development Director Simon Finlay has a key role in helping scale Castle Green’s operations and is a frequent user of LandTech.
We interviewed him to talk about where LandTech fits within their growth plans.
What challenges were they facing?
- We’re looking for technology to assist us to work quickly and at scale
- We need richness and aggregation of data for North Wales and the North West
How does LandTech help?
Castle Green has revolutionised the way its homes are bought and sold with its multi-award-winning customer platform Willow. It’s therefore unsurprising that its team have embraced the use of proptech like LandTech. But what we do differently for them is offer a one-stop-shop of information needed to make quick decisions and act fast on opportunities.
“Whenever we’re looking at land, and we could be looking at dozens of sites at once, we’re looking at it through the LandTech lens,” says Finlay.
Most valuable for the Castle Green team is our planning and policy data, which helps them determine any constraints, both present and emerging, that might affect their chance of getting planning permission. Obtaining data for North Wales isn’t as easy as it might be elsewhere, but Finlay commends LandTech for having “acted quickly in addressing feedback about the data required when assessing the potential of land and bridging gaps to improve the information available”.
For Castle Green, LandTech has brought all the information they need into one place, making it easier for their experts to work productively and efficiently. “LandTech helps us manage our time better as it enables us to access all the information we need about potential sites quickly and simply. It has comprehensive data about land ownership, valuations and planning applications we’d otherwise have to spend time searching for separately,” says Finlay.
But it’s not just the product that Castle Green loves. Their team benefits from regular catch ups with their Customer Success Manager who helps train and retrain the team to ensure they’re making the most out of every new feature in the ecosystem.
“Whenever we’re looking at land, and we could be looking at dozens of sites at once, we’re looking at it through the LandTech lens.. It’s a really good system used by the land team at Castle Green at different stages of the land acquisition process.
LandTech helps us manage our time better as it enables us to access all the information we need about potential sites quickly and simply. It has comprehensive data about land ownership, valuations and planning applications we’d otherwise have to spend time searching for separately.
It helps with due diligence and helps speeds up processes because it’s a one-stop shop, I’m also really impressed that they’ve acted quickly in addressing feedback about the data required when assessing the potential of land and bridging gaps to improve the information available.”
Simon Finlay
Development Director
What does the future look like?
During 2023, Castle Green’s Partnerships arm has rapidly grown with deals secured to deliver more than 800 affordable homes across eight sites. It’s also committed to delivering high quality private sale homes in sought-after locations across North Wales and the North West of England.
The ambitious business aims to deliver 500+ homes a year by 2024 including Partnerships and private sale properties. Castle Green is a carbon neutral company building high specification, energy-efficient homes for future generations, and they’re doing it with LandTech in their toolkit.
