The Land Appraisal Monster
Saving our Country, one development appraisal at a time.
Image created by Bluepencil
BREAKING NEWS: NEW DEVELOPMENT MODEL LAUNCHES JUST IN TIME TO SAVE THE COUNTRY FROM PLANNING CHAOS.
Housing supply under threat. Viability in crisis. And something unspeakable stirring beneath an Essex development site.
Masterplanning consultant Milo Graves was conducting a routine site visit at Blackthorn Field when the nebulous figure of a medieval nun rose from a hedgerow, shrieking:
“WHAT IS YOUR TRUE NET DEVELOPABLE AREA?”
Then, the trees began to whisper to the hedgerows. The site boundary was moving of its own accord, the borehole logs were filling with names of people who had been dead for centuries, and every time Milo looked at his plans, the houses had rearranged themselves into a web of strange shapes and symbols.
From somewhere beneath the proposed access road came the sound of a thousand voices chanting in unison:
“NO MITIGATION. NO VIABILITY. NO WAY THROUGH.”
Then his phone rang. It was the planning officer.
“Have you considered an alternative layout?”
Then the ground split open.
From the ancient wood emerged a hideous creature made of duplicated spreadsheets, contradictory assumptions and unresolved planning objections. It had 47 heads, each representing a different consultant.
Its battle cry?
“WE'LL NEED TO REVISIT THE ASSUMPTIONS.”
Houses suddenly vanished from the drawings. The school became a car park, the car park became a roundabout, the roundabout became a detention basin. On and on it went changing and morphing, one iteration after another.
House building was doomed.
Until Milo remembered a new development model he'd seen online.
The Bluepencil Development Model.
He opened bluepencilmodel.com.
He entered the land budget. Heads disappeared.
He adjusted the character-based capacity. More heads vanished.
He linked the planning contributions, sales values, costs and cashflow.
The monster began to shrink.
“BUT OUR SPREADSHEET SAYS…” it wailed tragically.
“Which assumptions?” Milo asked.
But the creature had no answer.
As the figures finally began talking to each other, the ancient curse was broken. The ghosts returned to their graves, the highway engineer accepted a sensible junction, the ecologist issued his invoice and the developer announced that the scheme was indeed viable, subject to further testing.
The planning committee deferred the decision. (Some evils, apparently, are beyond the reach of technology).
🎃 THE MORAL OF THE STORY
The real monster isn't the haunted site. It's a development appraisal where the land budget, capacity, contributions, viability and cashflow don't talk to each other.
That's why we've created the Bluepencil Development Model: bringing the key elements of residential development appraisal together, from feasibility through to detailed design, with linked calculations and transparent assumptions.
Because better-informed decisions are worth fighting for.
And the world has quite enough monsters already.
Discover the Bluepencil Development Model at bluepencilmodel.com
No ghosts were harmed in the making of this model. Several spreadsheets were exorcised.
