Developer wants to buy some of my Garden

lincroft1710

If developer is wise he'll retain "ransom strip", which being key to development means it'll cost the garden owners a lot of money to make sales of their gardens a viable proposition.

chickmug

lincroft1710 wrote: »

If developer is wise he'll retain "ransom strip", which being key to development means it'll cost the garden owners a lot of money to make sales of their gardens a viable proposition.

Absolutely right when I was in development the company had strips (of land that is ;-) )all over the place and worth a fortune.

sharkie

Hi, gut feeling is that £15000 is way too low. On right move sorting by area on sw london, a parking spaces under a large block of flat is the cheapest @ £5000. "A superb garage space, which can be used for storage or space for one car (15'9x8'3), ideally located on a quiet residential street moments from Lavender Hill and Clapham High Street." @ £39000. I'd do the same rightmove search around your area and sort the result by the lowest price

My first thought when I viewed your post was 'flats'. then you mentioned 4 consecutive houses and again got the vision of 'flats', not houses. More profit in flats and extra profit in service charges.

Over the years I have seen chickmug's post and he has always has given good advice, if not very good advice.

Strapped

You're out of your depth - get professional advice. No-one on here is qualified to advise you.

paul5046

Strapped wrote: »

You're out of your depth - get professional advice. No-one on here is qualified to advise you.

Agreed, as Chipmug also said.

Niche

I dont know where in surrey you are but £15k seems low, a relative of mine sold a 15m x 20m piece of garden and got £60k for it, his 2 neighbours sold approx the same amount and they built a 4 bed house that sold for £525k, this is in Epsom.

harryhound

Posh parts of Surrey, near enough to use but far enough not to hear the M25 were worth up to 3 million pounds per acre in the boom.
Perhaps there has been a slump of up to 50% in these prices (The materials and labour get a bit cheaper in a recession - the rest of the fall has to be absorbed by the land value)
You don't say how wide your plot is so I can't do the calculation but an acre is about 40% of a hectare. A hectare is 10,000 square meters. An acre is 4840 square yards.
You can do the calculations.

Other things to think about.
- How many stories: 1, 2, 3 ?. There is a battling thread on here somewhere about an attempt to build a big two story house in the garden next to a bungalow.
- What is the local council's policy?
- Where is the new building relative to the sun. My daughter had a home where there was no sun in the garden after 10:00 AM in the winter. She bought that house in the Summer & sold it in the Summer!
-How big are the back yards of the new houses; prepare for Leylandii wars.
-You really need to post a simple plan here if we are to offer more advice.
-Do you want to move rather than improve?
- Will the new development enhance local house prices or reduce them.
- There is a maximum value for a particular road/ neighbourhood.
- I'm no fan of perpetual restrictive covenants and I think they should be renewable every (say) 15 years only if a fee is paid to the land registry. That said you hane the ability to control what happens on your land. You could sell an option with a restrictive covenant and a contract to remove the covenant when the agree plans get planning permission or when the built houses are sold. (eg Mr developer you get the land for a pound and I get 40% of the value when you sell).

chickmug

Any update from OP would be good to hear?

Welshwoofs

£15k sounds really low to me...I'd also be worried about them changing their plans and you ending up with a house a few feet off your boundary and being seriously over-looked and that would impact the saleability of your own house.

myr90646

Developer came round on Friday evening to discuss the companies plans.

-Basically they are going to apply for permission to build 8 bungalows on land behind our gardens that has already been secured.

-Offers have been made to 8 of us for 15k a person for 25 metres of garden. Each section is fairly narrow 5-6 metre's.

-Offer is dependant on at least 4 of us (in a row accepting)

-If 4 of us accept then one additional bungalow will be built.

-If 6-8 of us accept, two additional bungalow's will be built.

-Offer has been made based on the land being worth 25% of the value of the finished properties.

-It's a 'take it or leave it' offer with no room for negotiation.

-The guy ended the meeting by say 'it will be great to have you on board but we will be going ahead with the development with or without you'.

So assuming this is true, not sure there is much point in paying out for professional advic? Its a case of us deciding if we want to take 15k or keep the development 25 metres further away.