We enter into promotion agreements with landowners, prepare and submit a planning application and seek to secure planning permission within the agreed timescale. Once planning permission is granted, the land is sold on the open market.

We use our in-house expertise and financial resources to promote land at no cost or risk to the landowners. This involves us taking responsibility for promoting the land. We fund the whole process ourselves and only receive our fee if and when the land is sold. Our fee is based on a share of what the land receives, meaning our interests are always completely aligned.

Throughout the process there is no financial risk or burden for the landowners and the land can continue to be used for its current purpose until the land is sold. We know that the work we do on the landowner’s behalf is critically important to them and as well as the uplift in land value there is often a consideration as to what legacy is left for the community in terms of design quality and new facilities. We work with our landowners to understand their aspirations for the project so they can rest assured that we are always acting in their best interests when managing the process.

The planning and development process can be complex and can be summarised as follows:

Planning phase

Once an agreement is reached, we engage with the community and local planning authority. We then prepare a full suite of technical reports and surveys produced by our expert team to support our planning application or to promote the land for a residential allocation through the local plan residential or commercial allocation (as appropriate) through the local plan. The strategy for every site will be agreed with the landowner and the submission of the application will be made within the agreed timescale.

Application phase

We seek to secure planning permission at a local level and in the event of an appeal or legal challenge we engage our barrister-led legal team in preparing the appeal case. At every stage, we rigorously test and check our applications to ensure compliance with adopted and emerging policies at both national and local level which will give us the best possible chance of a planning success.

Permission and sale

Once planning permission is granted, we manage a competitive tender process with the landowner's appointed agent, working with them to produce a shortlist of bidders. This maintains integrity and transparency and ensures that we achieve the optimum value for the land.