Know everything about a site — before you bid.
Any postcode. Minutes later: a complete, timestamped acquisition intelligence report — ownership, planning, environment, utilities and viability, screened, scored and ready to act on.
Land buying still runs
at the speed of the post.
The quantifying data a land team needs — statutory registers, academic datasets, environmental records — has historically meant outreach: letters, purchase orders, chasing consultants. Then every report that came back still needed a person to read, interpret and reconcile it.
- Weeks lost per site waiting for searches and desk studies to trickle back.
- Significant cost — surveys and consultant fees spent before go / no-go.
- Deal-killers surface late — covenants, refusal history, reinforcement costs found after the spend.
Every constraint,
on one map.
An interactive map with historical OS and satellite views — every screened layer toggled over the live parcel fabric.
- Gas mains by material & age — cast iron, steel, polyethylene.
- Coal-mine entries — treated and untreated shafts.
- Listed buildings, boreholes & pollution incidents around the site.
- Registered title parcels & red-line boundary — with overlap warnings.
Pick the registered parcel that matches your site — area, appraisal and Deal Score recompute instantly from the selected title.
The title, read for you.
A quick, effective, timestamped overview of the ownership structure — straight from the ordered register, interpreted by AI.
Burdens & interests
Restrictions, covenants, easements, occupational interests, registered charges and leases — each with its development implication.
VAT positioning
Option-to-tax flags — e.g. pension-scheme owners of former commercial land: budget ~20% VAT on the price.
Ransom & access
Red-line vs adopted highway — ransom-strip and access risk screened before you commit.
Motivated sellers
Corporate & distressed owners via Companies House; fragmentation & assembly signals from registry polygons.
What a first legal pass takes days to assemble, LandBuyer AI summarises before your first site visit.
The planning history speaks.
We make it legible.
- LPA policies, current and historical — the policy context your scheme lands in.
- Reasons for refusal, decision by decision — linked to each notice. The strongest predictor of what will fly.
- Approved & refused applications in the vicinity — precedent, mapped and dated.
- Allocation status — Local Plan allocation, brownfield register, windfall position.
- Live statutory designations — Green Belt, Conservation Area, Article 4, SSSI, SAC, SPA, Scheduled Monument and more.
- Community sentiment & hot topics — what the objections nearby were actually about.
Every S106 in your radius, decoded.
LandBuyer AI retrieves the Section 106 agreements for every site within your chosen radius and breaks them into oversights — the affordable percentages, commuted sums and infrastructure asks the authority actually secured.
Radius-wide recovery
S106s pulled for all sites in the search area — not just yours.
By stakeholder & seller
Split by who signed — development companies vs housing associations — benchmark against the right precedent.
Model your own bid
Know the real going rate on affordable % and contributions before you commit a number.
Environmental risk on the parcel — not the postcode.
- Tree preservation orders on and around the site, from live statutory data.
- Heritage status — listed buildings, conservation areas, scheduled monuments.
- Ground & mining risk — geology, boreholes, coal, radon.
- Flood risk on the parcel — river & sea plus surface water, from Environment Agency mapping.
- Contamination & pollution incidents — historic landfill, recorded incidents nearby.
- Every finding feeds the abnormals stack — priced, not just flagged.
BNG, baselined
and priced.
Mandatory 10% biodiversity net gain changed land maths for good. LandBuyer AI baselines the habitat units on your parcel with DEFRA's statutory metric — and prices all three routes to compliance.
On-site delivery
Habitat created within the scheme — with its land-take impact on developable area.
Off-site habitat bank
Market units purchased from a registered bank.
Statutory credits
The Government backstop — priced to be avoided.
BNG flows straight into the appraisal — no separate ecology spreadsheet.
The cost that kills schemes at month nine — on screen at minute one.
Distance to the nearest infrastructure, a RAG risk band and an indicative connection & reinforcement cost — for every service, from published network-operator charging methodologies and LiDAR terrain.
| Service | Nearest infra. | Risk | Indicative cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Electricity | 158m | Low | £20k–£50k · £300k–£1m if reinforcement |
| Gas | 210m | Medium | £15k–£250k |
| Water | 95m | Low | £30k–£150k |
| Foul drainage | 140m | Medium | £30k–£150k |
| Surface water | on-site SuDS | Low | £10k–£60k |
| Telecoms | 62m | Low | £0–£60k |
The local market,
quantified.
- Value gradients across the borough — how £/sq ft moves street by street, by local authority.
- Every recorded sale, with the specifics — type, beds, new-build status and price from HM Land Registry, date-adjusted via UK HPI with the new-build premium applied.
- Indicative tenure mixes for the area — what actually gets built and bought here.
- Local affordability context — earnings vs prices, demographics and deprivation from Census 2021 & IMD.
- Affordable housing insight — the parcel's requirement under the LPA's own policy, e.g. Trafford 40% · Manchester 20% · Stockport 30%.
A residual appraisal, pre-loaded with the parcel's own data.
No blank spreadsheet. Site area from the registered title, density from policy, sale values from real local comps, build costs benchmarked from BCIS £/m² by typology, BNG costed, CIL & S106 applied — a full waterfall to residual land value the moment the screen completes.
- GDV → build cost → fees → BNG → CIL/S106 → abnormals → residual — every line visible and editable.
- Viability gap with a confidence range — ±10%, stated, not hidden.
- Levers to close the gap — affordable %, density, grant — recomputed live.
- Grant-funding flags — Homes England AHP, Brownfield Land Release Fund.
Your land pipeline,
ranked and shared.
Save & rank by Deal Score
Every screened site lands in one pipeline, ordered by score — compare pursuits side by side.
Recirculate within the team
Files, notes and key data sources attached to the site and shared internally — everyone negotiates from the same evidence.
Raise for external input
Package the evidenced questions for your solicitors and professional consultants — they start from the answer, not the search.
Timestamped audit trail
Every screen dated and source-cited — defensible in board papers and funder reviews. An AI assistant answers questions on any report.
Build more houses,
in less time.
- Weeks of outreach per candidate site.
- £5k–£15k screening spend at risk, every time.
- Deal-killers discovered after the spend.
- Few sites pursued, slowly.
- Minutes per screen — pursue only what scores.
- Survey costs avoided — commission only what the score justifies.
- Deal-killers priced on day one.
- 10× the sites screened — bid on the right ones.
Bring three postcodes.
Watch them screened live.
A 30-minute call. You choose the sites — from your live pipeline, not our showreel. We screen them in front of you, in minutes, and you leave with the reports.
