Services

Full development management

We work to make your scheme viable, then to protect that viability at every stage where it can be lost. We take a site from appraisal through planning, procurement, build and exit: development management from site to sale, and construction management on site. The usual client is a developer with a London site, from a single infill plot to several hundred homes. The services below can be taken together or one at a time. Each is a lesson our founder paid for.

Viability and site appraisal: keep a contingency

We appraise your site for a viable scheme: the planning route, the build cost and the sales values. We hold a contingency defended against your enthusiasm and ours, and you will not get an appraisal from us that assumes the next three years will look like the last three. The appraisal is where optimism does its damage. When the tide went out in 2022 the gap between the price our founder had fixed and the cost he was paying was wider than any reserve he had kept.

Planning for a viable scheme

We take your scheme through planning to a viable permission. Most of a scheme's value is made or lost in what goes into that permission, and planning is where the programme is most often wrong. Our founder has been on the building side of schemes that went through numerous councils, through listed building consent and through appeals. We can also see how AI is rapidly transforming the planning process on recent and live projects (for good and bad) and can bring cutting edge experience of how it can be optimised.

Appointing the team and the contractor: hire quality

We help you choose the architect, the quantity surveyor, the employer's agent and the contractor who will finish the job, and we tell you what a low tender is leaving out. Always interrogate a low-priced tender return. It can make a scheme look viable on paper and not on site. When a job starts badly it will only get worse: you chase to get the cost back and hire less good subcontractors, and they cost you more than the saving. Our founder sat on the other side of that tender as a contractor from 2008 to 2025.

Project and construction management: plan for what goes wrong

“If it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.”

We manage the build to keep the scheme viable: we run the programme, the risk register and the cost reports, chair the site meetings and deal with the contractor in his own language. When something goes wrong, and it will, you hear it from us first, with a plan attached. Covid, Brexit, an HSE inspection, a subcontractor who does not turn up: each happened to our founder on a live site, and the scheme still finished.