Make housing cost less.
A home costs what it costs partly because of what it takes to deliver one. We are building the system a developer runs a scheme on — land to handover, in one place.
Every scheme passes through all of them. No two share a system, so the same facts get re-entered at each gate and the answer to any question is to go and ask somebody.
Four steps down, nobody is working.
Housing in Britain costs too much because we build too few homes.
We build too few because there are far fewer firms building them. The small and mid-sized developers who once delivered a large share of British housing have been disappearing for three decades.
They cannot survive because delivering a scheme costs nearly the same whether it is ten homes or two hundred. The same appraisals, consultants, reports and approvals. Small schemes carry big-scheme overhead.
That overhead is heavy because none of it runs on a system. A scheme lives in spreadsheets, email threads and a dozen consultants who each hold one piece of it. Nothing holds the whole project.
The cost of a home includes the cost of running the business that builds it. That part was never industrialised.
One system of record for a scheme.
Not another tool to add to the stack. The place the scheme itself lives, so what you decided at appraisal is still the thing being measured on site two years later.
Whether a site works
Appraisal that holds the assumptions, the constraints and the numbers together — so you know what a site can carry before you spend on finding out.
The scheme through planning
Design and application in one thread, with every document, condition and consultee response attached to the scheme rather than to somebody's inbox.
Cost against the plan
Procurement, programme and spend measured against the appraisal you started from, so drift shows up while it is still cheap to correct.
Units out the door
Sales, completions and the handover pack falling out of a record that has been building itself since the day you first looked at the land.
One scheme, one system, from the day you look at the land to the day you hand over the keys.
Cheaper to run means more people building.
Homes a year, if small builders recovered the share of British housing they held in 1988.
That share was not lost to a shortage of land or of demand. It was lost to the cost and the risk of being a small developer at all. Every hour and every pound spent administering a scheme rather than delivering it is a reason there is one fewer firm doing this work.
Lower the cost of running a development business and you widen the set of people who can run one. That is the mechanism by which software gets more homes built.
We are early, and we are in the field.
We are not selling anything yet. We are spending this year with the people who run schemes, watching how the work actually gets done. If that is you, we would like an hour.
- Small and mid-sized residential developers
- Development and project managers on live schemes
- Land and planning directors at housebuilders
- Anyone running a development off a spreadsheet they built themselves