Managing your residential project properly at the pre-development stage maximises your chances of delivering the result you want on time and on budget. Here are six simple steps to follow.
1. Be clear on your objectives
The first stage to successfully delivering a project is being clear on your objectives. It might sound obvious, but many projects fall at this first hurdle.
For example, planning consultants usually see the objective as securing planning permission – in reality, it rarely is. Most of the time the objective is to build something or to sell something. Planning is an important step on the way to achieving those objectives, but it’s still only a stepping stone. Knowing what the real end goal is helps make sure that you’re doing the right things to get there.
2. Put a plan in place
Once you understand the objective, the next step is to put a plan in place. It can be helpful to build your plan round four key questions:
- How are you going to get there?
- What support will you need?
- How long will it take?
- What will it cost?
Answering those questions might need a bit of research – reviewing planning documents or looking at other new build housing sites which are selling nearby, for example.
3. Pick your team of consultants
In most cases, you will need to appoint specialist consultants to help. For a planning application, that might mean an architect or highways consultant; for a land sale, you might need a geo-environmental specialist to carry out some site investigations.
Choosing who to appoint isn’t just about price – it is about value for money. Paying a little more to get better quality advice and reports can pay dividends in the long run.
4. Make sure everyone is pulling in the same direction
When consultants are instructed, it is important to make sure they have a good understanding of the overall project and the end result you’re looking for. Their input is just one piece of a much larger jigsaw – giving them that overview helps them tailor their advice to your specific situation and reduces the time needed to review and re-draft reports.
The context might change over time, too, as supporting reports reveal more about the site. That information needs to be quickly and clearly fed back to the other consultants working on the project so the can adapt.
It is often helpful to see an early draft of reports or drawings so that you can comment on them before they are finalised and make sure everything is heading in the right direction.
5. Challenge the assumptions of others
One of your main jobs as a project manager is to challenge the information you’re being provided with. That doesn’t mean aggressive, Jeremy Paxman-style questioning. It means asking the right questions to make sure you fully understand the information you are being provided with.
As the only person that will have totally visibility of the entire project, that ensures you are getting the best possible planning application or the best possible information pack for your marketing exercise. Good consultants will make recommendations based on what is the most cost effective solution from their point of view – but you might know something else that changes the balance. For instance, increasing the amount of landscaping on part of the site that you can’t develop might enable you to reduce it elsewhere.
6. Things change – be flexible!
However well you plan your project in the first place, things change – they always do. Reports get delayed or identify things you didn’t expect which need further investigation. Planning applications run slowly because two statutory consultees want contradictory changes. Developers ask for extensions to the bid deadline.
Sometime, that can’t be avoided. They key thing is to understand the reasons and be flexible. Can the work be done in a different order so the project isn’t delayed overall? Can other bits of work be scaled back to free up money in the budget? Or do you just have to accept that it’s one of those things, and the project will take longer or cost more than planned?
At Longwall Property, we have 20 years’ experience in managing residential development projects from site identification, through acquisition, local plan promotion, planning applications and site sale. You can use the skills and experience we’ve developed over that time to help deliver your project – whether that’s for the whole project, or just a part of it; for one project or lots of them.
Think of us as your “Consultant Land Director.”
Get in touch today to find out how.
Longwall Property 