By Legal Futures’ Associates Redbrick Solutions
A dream location is where it all starts for most of our clients and the importance of a location and its attributes remain key when it comes to buying and selling properties. If we’re buying a property, we can actively choose to be nearer a good school, further from a main road, opt for more bedrooms or better transport links. However, how a location and its attributes evolve is never within our control. Change to an area, our neighbourhoods, the house next door, is inevitable.
For anyone investing in a property, the risk of local development impacting a location is crucial to understand. Development can impact local infrastructure, the aesthetics of an area, views, traffic volume and of course, property value. This impact isn’t always negative, although we tend to be opposed to local development than for it! Disused buildings can quickly become eyesores and a magnet for anti-social behaviour. Developing these plots can have a hugely positive impact on an area. Or more commonly, we hear about a large housing development planned for our local green space and feel angry that we knew nothing about it and can only think of all the negative implications. Understanding just what is planned and what has potential for planning in our local area is key.
Getting the research right
How do you protect yourself from being uninformed? Well, you do your due diligence of course. You instruct your conveyancer to run the appropriate searches to disclose planned and potential development. It should be that simple but it’s not.
Critically, there are changes to housing policy and processes at work in our local councils that put all our neighbourhoods at risk of development. Standard searches do not actually access the entirety of the planning data available. This can leave buyers and conveyancers exposed to the risks of development impacting the purchase, the property value and a solicitor’s professional indemnity.
We’re going to tell you exactly how to get a location researched comprehensively for development risk, and about the policies and processes affecting your clients’ property purchases. Tune into the DevAssist webinar, ‘How to avoid being sued for £2m’ on May 18th at 11am by registering here or visiting redbricksolutions.co.uk/events-calendar.
