What a development company is actually for
Six things we take responsibility for. None of them is construction — that is the contractor's job, and confusing the two is how developments go wrong.
Site appraisal and acquisition
Whether a site can carry the use at all: access and servicing, floor-to-floor heights, structural capacity for the loadings proposed, where plant can physically sit, the planning history, and any title or rights issues that will govern what is possible. This is done before commitment, not after.
Development appraisal
Costs built up from the actual requirement and current rates, with a contingency that reflects the risk rather than one chosen to make the total acceptable. If the appraisal only works on optimistic assumptions, that is the finding, and we report it.
Planning and consents
Assembling and directing the professional team through planning and the statutory approvals that sit alongside it. Run as a single strategy, because sequential applications each discover the previous one's assumptions at the worst possible moment.
Design co-ordination
Holding architect, structural engineer, services engineer and specialist designers to one co-ordinated design. Most on-site clashes are co-ordination failures that were visible on the drawings weeks earlier.
Procurement and delivery
Choosing the contract and the contractor to match the risk profile, then administering it: valuations, instructions, change control, and holding a co-ordinated design against the pressure to reopen it.
Refurbishment and conversion
Existing buildings, where survey information matters more than drawings. Structural condition, services capacity, asbestos and fire strategy are established before the programme is fixed, because a surprise on a live site is the most expensive kind.
What we are not
Three things we are regularly assumed to be and are not: a builder, an agent, and an adviser you could rely on instead of your own. We hold no regulated permissions, issue no valuations for lending, and offer nothing here as an investment. Where a RICS valuation, a solicitor's opinion or an engineer's report is required we appoint one — and a counterparty should lean on that document rather than on our reading of it.