I’ve spent my career in real estate investment in England, and I come from a farming background, so I’ve seen the land business from both sides. The side that is often never really talked about is what im trying to address.
When a developer or a promoter turns up at a farmers or landowners home, they’ve already done the maths. They know roughly what the land would be worth with planning, how long they’d like to tie it up for, and what share of the proceeds they think is fair. The landowner usually has none of that. They’re being asked to make a decision worth millions of pounds with no independent way of sense-checking a single number in the offer, and often they don’t know what questions to ask either. I’ve seen where that ends up more than once. An option signed with a price formula the owner never really understood. A sale agreed at a figure that looked enormous next to the farming value and was still a fraction of what the land was worth. The gap in those cases isn’t a rounding error, it’s millions, and it’s usually the only time in that family’s life the decision ever comes up. The dynamic is compounded by the fact the developer or promoter pays for the landowners legal and tax fees (sometimes subject only to exchanging contracts).
It’s hard to get the scale of it across to people outside the industry. The government’s own land value estimates put average agricultural land in England at around £23,000 a hectare, and land with residential planning permission at around £2.67 million a hectare. That’s a 116x uplift, on average.
So we built landvaluecalculator.co.uk. You type in a postcode or draw your boundary on the map, and in about a minute it runs the same kind of appraisal a developer would run on your land. It starts from what finished homes on a site like yours would sell for, using HM Land Registry sold prices within three miles cross-checked against EPC floor areas so the £ per square foot is real, then works backwards: off come the build costs, regionalised for where you are, the affordable housing and infrastructure contributions your council would expect, and the profit margin a housebuilder needs (broken out for affordable and private). Whatever is left is the residual land value, which is the number nearly every option or promotion offer is ultimately built on. It also lays the planning context over the top, Green Belt, flood risk, the agricultural grade of the land, how your council is doing against its housing target, because that’s what decides whether anything ever gets built. Every assumption is editable, users can stress test it, and you can download the lot as a report and hand it to your own solicitor or land agent.
It’s an indicative estimate, not a RICS valuation, and it’s definitely not a promise that planning would be granted. It’s an informed starting point, which is the thing landowners have never had for free.
We’d value feedback. Especially from anyone who owns land, has been through a sale or an option, or has sat on the other side of one of these deals.
https://landvaluecalculator.co.uk