The squeeze on small developers — and why we're leaning in

Forty years ago, small and medium housebuilders delivered around four in ten new homes in this country. Today it is closer to one in ten. That is not because the appetite went away. It is because the ground got harder for anyone building at our scale.

The squeeze is real, and it is worth naming plainly. Build costs have risen and stayed high. Exit values — what a finished home will actually sell for — have not moved to match. Finance is dearer and harder to come by than it was. And planning, for a small site, can take longer and cost more, proportionally, than it does for a large one. Surveys of SME builders put planning delay at the very top of what holds them back, and a large majority say market conditions are stopping them taking on new sites at all. None of that is news to anyone doing this for a living.

But the ground is shifting

Something is changing, though, and it is changing in a direction that suits the way we work. The national planning rules are being rewritten with small and medium sites specifically in mind — a new, lighter-touch category for schemes of roughly ten to fifty homes, a clearer presumption in favour of brownfield land, and more support for the infill and regeneration that used to be nobody's priority. A new housing bank is being stood up to get money flowing to the parts of the market the big lenders overlook. For once, the intent is pointed at businesses like ours.

Small sites are the opportunity

That is the opening we are built for. We work on small sites — the tired house on a good plot, the large garden, the awkward corner a volume builder would not look at twice. The value on those sites is won at planning and protected by building them properly, and both of those are things we know how to do. A harder market rewards judgement: knowing which sites are worth pursuing, what a council will actually accept, and how to keep a scheme viable from first appraisal to finished home.

So we are not waiting for conditions to get easier. We are securing sites, bringing them through planning, and building relationships with the landowners and investors who want to do something with land they are sitting on. Some of that is our own development. Some of it is helping others — landowners deciding whether to sell or partner, self-builders who want price certainty, investors backing a scheme run by someone who has sat on both sides of a land deal.

The honest picture is that this is a demanding time to be a small developer. It is also, quietly, one of the more interesting ones — because the sites that suit us are exactly the ones policy is starting to favour. We would rather lean into that than wait it out. If you have got a site, or you are weighing up what to do with land you own, we are always happy to have an honest conversation about it.