Buying a Plot: What to Check Before You Bid

The envelope decides the house

Everything else is negotiable. What the plot permits is not, and it is knowable before you bid. Landed housing is controlled by an envelope — setbacks, storeys, height and site coverage — so the maximum shape of the house is fixed by the plot before any design begins.

Shape and width

Regular, rectangular plots build efficiently. Irregular or tapering plots lose usable area to setbacks and produce plans that fight themselves.

Frontage often matters more than total area. Width decides how many rooms can face the garden, whether the plan can be organised around a courtyard, and how the arrival works. Two plots of the same area — one wide and shallow, one narrow and deep — produce very different houses.

Orientation

Here, controlling the east and west faces is worth real money in comfort and running cost. A plot whose main elevations face north and south lets you open the house up without paying for it in cooling.

Where the plot forces the principal rooms to face west, it is solvable — shading, screens, deep reveals, the right glass — but it is a cost and a constraint you inherit permanently.

Level, drainage and access

Sloping sites carry cost in retaining walls and in forming the platform. Low-lying plots may need raising to meet the minimum platform level set by PUB, which changes how the ground floor meets the street. A plot at the low point of a road collects what the road sheds.

Access is the other cost that never appears in an asking price. A plot that cannot take a crane, a concrete truck or a piling rig — a narrow lane, a tight turn — constrains every trade and is priced into every quotation, often without being itemised. Building tight against neighbouring houses adds protection works and monitoring on top.

The encumbrances — check before you commit

• Drainage reserves along the boundaries, which cannot be built over.
• Road line reserves set aside for future widening, which reduce what can be developed.
• Public sewers crossing the plot, with their protection zones.
• Protected trees, on the plot or on the road reserve beside it.
• Easements and rights of way, particularly on subdivided plots.
• Unauthorised works on the existing house, which the buyer inherits.
• Special area controls — Good Class Bungalow areas, conservation areas, and landed housing areas with their own storey limits.

The neighbours, and the street

Party wall conditions, overlooking, and how much of your view belongs to somebody else's future development rights. The last one catches people out repeatedly: check what the neighbours are permitted to build before you value the view.

Then walk the street at different times of day. Whether the houses around you are being renewed tells you something about the ceiling on your own. You can rebuild your house. You cannot rebuild the street.

Before you bid

Commission a feasibility study and obtain the title and survey plans. It tests the envelope against what you want to build, prices the risks particular to the site, and gives a view of what the finished house is likely to be worth. It takes a few weeks and regularly changes the decision — which is exactly what it is for.