Buying land with full planning consent to build a new dwelling house: 5 legal top tips

Specialist development and land solicitor, Chris Milner, offers some tips when buying land with the intention of property development.

After countless hours of searching, you have come across a plot of land for sale that benefits from full planning consent to build a new dwelling. The proposed project may be to build your “forever home” or you may be an experienced developer who sees a good business opportunity.

On the face of it this may seem like a “simple transaction”, however it is important to remember that you are effectively still buying a development site, albeit a small one in terms of unit numbers, and the same principles from buying a much larger scheme apply. A different approach is required from a routine commercial or residential purchase.

Below are 5 top tips to bear in mind if you are considering purchasing land for this purpose:

1. Development searches: alongside the usual searches, development specific searches are required. For example, a commercial highways search is essential, to ensure the adopted highway does directly abut the boundary of the site at the point of the proposed access. A full utilities search is also imperative, showing where all existing utilities and services sit in relation to the site.
2. Utilities and Services: it is important to get a technical consultant on board as early as possible to review the utilities search, ensure the required utilities and services are readily available to connect into the site with sufficient capacity and are within your development budget.
3. Overlay drawings: a simple but crucial step, you need an architect to overlay the red line planning site drawing (for which planning consent has been granted) with the land registry title plan(s) for the site. The reason is to ensure the land you are buying from the seller includes all the areas within the planning red line. If it doesn’t then the position needs to be rectified, as you can’t deliver the parts of the scheme on land that you don’t own.
4. Planning conditions: you need to fully understand the conditions attached to the planning consent, the actions you need to take and by when. It is advisable to have either a planning consultant or planning law solicitor to review the planning consent and associated documents to ensure they are satisfactory and to advise you.
5. Letters of reliance: if any reports were obtained by the seller during obtaining the planning consent, for example an ecology report on Great Crested Newts, you will need reliance on that report. This means that you can legally rely on the contents on that report, and if it transpires that the contents of the report are incorrect (i.e. there are newts which hold up development) you have the right to sue the report provider. Also not to be missed is ensuring the architect who prepared the planning drawings provides you with a licence to use the copyright in those planning drawings.

If you are looking at purchasing land for this purpose, Holmes & Hills’ specialist land development solicitors can assist with such transactions.