Four steps to find and fund sites fast

Finding sites is hard, and finding sites that aren’t a waste of time is even harder.

You don’t want to be like your competitors, or the old you, wasting time researching and progressing sites that aren’t worth it.

The odds of stumbling across the perfect site straight away are pretty low.

So you want to make sure you’re doing everything you can to increase these odds. And we’re here to share some simple steps for how to make this possible. 

1. Perform checks early on 

Time spent on irrelevant sites can easily spiral – especially when you don’t perform early (or even early-ish) checks.

Arguably one of the most important early checks is: ‘Is this site going to make me and my investors our money back or should I forget about it?’

You want to make sure you’re not pouring time and money into a site that isn’t going to reap the bounty you need it to. 

Now, if you’ve been in the industry a long time, you likely have a good gut feel for these things.

But you don’t get years in the game by just trusting the stars or relying solely on your intuition. 

In property, you need to KNOW, not just feel. It may sound basic but always do your own checks before you send it off to the consultants for the extensive (and expensive) due diligence part. 

Or you may want to do all the due diligence yourself – and, luckily, LandTech can help you with this.

2. Back up your instincts with rigorous due diligence 

LandInsight not only helps with the finding sites part, but you can effortlessly assess sites from the comfort of your desk too. 

You can assess any UK site’s worthiness within LandInsight based on its policy constraints (on a national and locally adopted level).

We have all the go-to restrictions you’d want to check, like Protected land and Housing allocation, but also slightly less obvious criteria like Agricultural Land Classifications (for redeveloping old farmland or even offsetting for Biodiversity Net Gain), Ancient Woodland, and SHLAA (for those sites that already have the thumbs up for housing).

You can look at planning applications, or planning permissions won by appeal for less evident opportunities, and see the proposed development boundaries of sites to make a quick judgment on consented sites.

LandInsight allows you to see if properties are in-use or unoccupied for motivated sellers that’ll give you under-market prices. Plus you can see if the site is classified as heritage land or is listed. Or whether it’s close to a substation that has capacity for your ideal solar development.

You can create your own letters to send to landowners without the hassle of actually writing a letter, you can compile a report on site with the key information instantly included, and you can make sure you’re automatically alerted to planning applications that will float your boat.

3. Create development appraisals quickly 

'What about the super-quick, super-useful, customisable financial appraisal bit?’ I hear you ask. 

Well, we do those too. 

With LandFund’s development appraisal tool, you can take any site that you’ve found and assessed with LandInsight, and start making a lender-ready report for it in minutes. 

It has everything you need to wow prospective lenders. 

We’ve got residual land values, sensitivity reports, templates where you can set your CIL, Topographical survey and S106 obligations costs, and a cashflow feature. And you can download all this information into a clear and customisable PDF that will put you in the best position to get your project funded. 

Oh, and the tool is completely free. Even if you’re not a LandInsight customer – we still want you to be able to quickly and reliably financially appraise sites.

But it doesn’t stop there. We have one final cherry (for now) on the development-process cake which is LandTech.

4. Get the perfect funding match 

So, you’ve found and assessed a site using LandInsight, created a development appraisal with LandFund, and you see that the numbers stack up. All you need now is a financier to help make this dream a reality. 

As a development finance brokerage, LandFund will pair you with the lender that’s best suited to your project and will give you the most competitive terms. 

We’ll do all the hard work to get you the best rates for your project – regardless of financing model or development type. So, you can focus on lining up your next project. 

An end-to-end property solution

Speak to our support staff, or your Customer Success Manager, if you want help to leverage every tool in the LandTech development arsenal.

Or if you’re not yet a customer but want to find out how LandTech can help you across every step of the development process, check out our full-spectrum product offering.