Finding a self build plot is the hardest part of building your own home for most people, and buying the wrong one is the most expensive mistake you can make. A poor design can be redrawn. A budget can be reworked. A plot with no access, no affordable electricity supply or a strip of someone else’s land along the front stays that way however much money you throw at it afterwards.
This guide covers both halves of the problem: where to find land, including the plots that never reach a listing, and how to judge one before you offer. The second half follows our free Plot Appraisal tool, forty questions in the order you can actually answer them. Open it in another tab and work through it as you read. By the end you will have a written appraisal of your plot rather than a feeling about it.
Deciding whether or not to purchase that plot is one of the biggest decisions you have to make and one of the main reasons we created the initial strategy session. In a 60 minute session I can fully appraise the site, prepare a report and talk you through it – good or bad!
HOW TO FIND A SELF BUILD PLOT
Start with the obvious places, because some plots really are just for sale.
- Plot-finding websites. Plotfinder and PlotBrowser list building land and properties suitable for replacement, and both let you set alerts by area.
- Rightmove and Zoopla, filtered to land. Plenty of plots sit there with no planning or with consent about to lapse, so read the details carefully.
- The land and new homes departments of local estate agents. Ring them, tell them what you are looking for and ask to be called first.
- Property auctions. Cheap land turns up here, often with a problem that explains the price, and you will have had very little time to find it.
- Your council’s self build register, often called the Right to Build register. Councils in England have to keep one and take it into account when they plan for housing. Joining costs nothing and occasionally leads to serviced plots.
- Replacement dwellings. A tired bungalow on a big plot is often the easiest way in, because the principle of a house on the site is already established. Search the house listings, not just the land.
Every other self builder in your area is looking at the same listings. The better plots tend to go to people who went looking for land that nobody had thought of selling yet.
Creating a plot that is not for sale
Open Google Maps, switch to satellite view and go slowly over the villages and edges of town you would like to live in. You are looking for space: a long rear garden with a lane behind it, a corner plot with a side garden wide enough for a house, a block of old garages, a paddock between two houses, a bungalow sitting on half an acre. Street View then tells you whether there is a way in and what the neighbours look like.
When something catches your eye, find out who owns it. HM Land Registry’s free INSPIRE map shows the boundaries of registered freehold land, and the title register and title plan cost £7 each from GOV.UK. The register gives you the owner’s name and an address to write to.
Then write to them. A short, polite letter through the door does more than people expect, because plenty of owners have never considered that part of their garden could be worth a significant sum. Say who you are, that you are looking to build a single home for your own family in the village, that you would pay for everything including planning, and that there is no obligation. A leaflet to every house on a street with long gardens works the same way. Most will come to nothing, and you only need one.
Creating a plot is the best way, it will often be cheaper and you will have less competition as it isn’t on the open market. Get that letter out or even knock on the door, I have seen really amazing sites created this way.
Local Facebook groups and village pages are worth the same effort. Post that you are a local family looking for a small piece of land to build one house, and ask people to message you. It reaches the owner who would never call an agent, and the neighbour who knows that the farmer down the road has been thinking about selling the field corner. Parish councils, local builders, farmers and the solicitors and accountants who handle local estates all hear about land before it is advertised. Tell them what you are after.
The council’s planning search is the other underused source. Look for refused, withdrawn and lapsed applications for single houses in your area. Each one is an owner who has already tried to build, and some of them would sell to someone who will do it properly.
One caution on garden plots. Building behind or beside an existing house is called backland or infill development, and councils treat it carefully. Access, overlooking and the character of the street will decide whether it gets permission, so read the council’s policy on it before you get your hopes up, and make any deal conditional on planning.
TWO THINGS TO DO BEFORE YOU LOOK AT ANY PLOT
A plot is not good or bad on its own. It is good or bad for a particular house, so you need to know what that house is before you can judge the land.
Write the brief first. The free Architect Brief Creator takes you through eight sets of questions about how you live and what you need, and leaves you with a written brief. Our guide on how to write an architect brief explains why it matters.
Then work out what that house costs to build. Not what you can borrow, but what the house you have described costs on top of the plot. The Self Build Cost Calculator gives you a figure that includes the costs most people leave out.
With those two in hand, every question below has a proper answer. Without them you are judging a plot against a house that does not exist yet.
Found a plot you like?
Talk it through with Allan before you offer. One hour on Zoom, a written summary of the risks and your next steps.
IS THERE PLANNING PERMISSION, AND WHAT KIND?
This is the first question in the Plot Appraisal tool and one of the five marked “Can kill it”. A cheap plot is usually cheap for one reason: there is no planning policy to support a house on it, and no design will fix that.
Full permission is the strongest position. Outline permission or planning in principle establishes that a house is acceptable, but leaves the detail to be approved. A lawful existing house that could be replaced establishes the principle on its own, even without a current consent.
If there is a permission, check when it lapses. A consent with a few months left on it needs to be implemented quickly or renewed, and a lapsed one is worth very little on its own.
Then read the conditions, not just the decision notice. The cost hides in the conditions, and an access condition attached at outline stage is the one that most often turns out to be undeliverable. The planning history matters too: a refusal on policy grounds does not change because the land changed hands.
WHAT DOES THE PLOT LOOK LIKE ON PAPER?
Most of what rules a plot out can be found at a desk, before you drive anywhere, and none of it costs anything. The tool groups these as its first ten questions.
Check whether the plot sits inside the settlement boundary in the council’s local plan. Outside it, you are arguing the principle of a new house against policy rather than with it. Check the designations: green belt, conservation area, National Park, National Landscape and ecological protections each narrow what you will be allowed to build. Look for listed buildings and tree preservation orders on or near the plot.
Look up the flood maps for the postcode, and make sure you look at surface water as well as rivers and the sea. Surface water is mapped separately and it is the one that catches people out.
Finally, do the sum that most buyers skip. Add the plot price to the build cost from the calculator and compare the total with what finished houses on that street actually sell for. Spend more than the street supports and you will not get it back.
CAN YOU GET IN AND OUT?
Access is another “Can kill it” question, and the first thing to look at when you stand on the plot. Is there an existing access, and can you see far enough in both directions to pull out safely? Poor visibility usually means a wider entrance, a visibility splay or both, and those need land and money.
Think about the build as well as the house. Everything arrives by lorry, the spoil leaves the same way, and somewhere has to take the scaffold, the frame and a few weeks of materials. A plot a lorry cannot get into will not stop a build, but it costs more in smaller deliveries, double handling and a longer programme.
Never offer on a plot you have only seen in photographs. Walk it, and if you can, go back at a different time of day.
WHAT IS THE GROUND TELLING YOU?
You can read a surprising amount from standing on a plot. Soft or wet ground, reeds and rushes, a damp corner, a ditch or a spring all point to water, and water means drainage and foundation costs you cannot see on a listing. Lots of mature trees affect the ground around them and may be protected.
Look for signs that the land has been used before: hardstanding, rubble, old foundations, a concrete base. Made ground and any previous commercial use mean a contamination question for your solicitor and your engineer.
Look at the slope where the house would go. You do not need to measure it; walk across the footprint and judge it. A sloping plot means retaining walls, stepped foundations and more spoil to take away, all of which cost money. And note anything crossing the plot, such as overhead lines, poles or manhole covers. These either move at your expense or decide where the house can go.
DOES THE HOUSE YOU WANT ACTUALLY FIT?
This is where the brief earns its keep. The plot fixes the orientation, and either your brief survives that or it does not. If the living spaces you want facing south would end up looking at a road or a neighbour’s wall, you need to know before you buy.
Look at what overlooks the plot and what you would overlook. Both get raised at planning, and one of them gets raised by a neighbour. Find out what next door actually does: a farm, a pub, a yard or a railway can be quiet on a Sunday afternoon and very different at six on a weekday morning.
Check the boundaries on the ground against the title plan as well. What is fenced and what is being sold disagree more often than people expect.
WHAT WILL THE SERVICES COST?
Services are where a viable plot quietly stops being viable, because none of them has a price you can look up.
The electricity connection is the one to start first, and the third “Can kill it” question in the tool. There is no published tariff for a connection anywhere in Great Britain. It is quoted case by case by the network operator, it varies enormously with distance and with whether your connection needs the local network reinforcing, and it can be large enough on its own to make a plot unviable. Note how far the nearest pole or transformer is and ask for a budget quote before you offer.
Then ask about water, drainage and the rest:
- How far away is the water main? A connection is one cost. Extending a main to reach you is another entirely.
- Is there a public sewer within reach? If not, you need a treatment plant and ground that will take the discharge.
- Where will rainwater go? The same ground conditions decide whether a soakaway works.
- Do you want gas at all? New houses are moving away from it, and a connection you will not use is money for nothing.
- Broadband and mobile signal, checked standing on the plot, if you plan to work from home.
These answers come back from utility companies in weeks rather than days, so ask early.
WHO OWNS THE LAND THE ACCESS NEEDS?
The fourth and fifth “Can kill it” questions are both legal, and both are about the strip of land between the plot and the road.
Planners often attach an access condition that turns out to be unmanageable, because the visibility splay needs land the seller does not own. You can own the plot outright and still not control the thing that makes it buildable. If third-party land is involved, you need an agreement in place before you commit.
A ransom strip is the other version of the same problem: a strip of someone else’s land, however narrow, between your plot and the public highway. Whoever owns it can name their price, and you will pay it later with no room to negotiate. Ask your solicitor to confirm the plot meets the adopted highway.
WHAT ELSE IS ON THE TITLE?
Get the title register and title plan early, and check that the plan matches the boundaries you walked. Then ask your solicitor specifically about:
- restrictive covenants, which can forbid building altogether;
- overage or clawback, which hands the seller a share of any rise in value;
- rights of way and easements crossing the plot;
- public sewers, which carry a build-over exclusion zone that can land exactly where you wanted the house.
Your solicitor does this work, but you have to know to ask for it. The tool’s printed appraisal lists the questions still open, so you can hand it straight over.
WHAT WILL THE PLOT ITSELF ADD TO THE BUILD COST?
Every plot carries costs that sit on top of the house rather than inside it: demolition, clearance, access works, service connections, surveys, planning fees and an allowance for foundations you cannot see yet. Take the build cost from the Self Build Cost Calculator and add these to it.
The most expensive assumption at this stage is that standard strip footings will do. On one project the ground was clay with heave and needed piles. The foundations cost £40,000 more than the strip footings everyone had assumed, none of it was visible without a site investigation, and by then the land was bought.
If you want those extras checked by someone who prices them for a living, our Resident Mentor Tim Phillips is a quantity surveyor and can take you through them in a specialist session.
IS YOUR OFFER CONDITIONAL ON A SITE INVESTIGATION?
This is the last of the five “Can kill it” questions, and the one people most often leave out. A site investigation commissioned after you own the land tells you what you have bought. Made a condition of the contract, it lets you walk away or renegotiate if the ground is bad.
You will need a structural engineer to specify the investigation and interpret what comes back, so appoint one early. Agree a period of exclusivity long enough to get the investigation and any planning answers back, and assume decisions will take longer than the statutory period rather than counting on it.
Personally I would only ever buy a site without a conditional offer, if it had already gone through the Building Regs process for a house that was similar in size and design than I wanted to build. If not make it conditional, you need an escape route out of the purchase if it has major issues.
COMPARING MORE THAN ONE PLOT
Most people end up choosing between two or three plots, and the one they saw most recently tends to win. The Plot Appraisal tool keeps a separate set of answers for each plot, with its price, size and listing link, and the Compare tab puts them side by side.
Read the comparison flags first and money second. A cheaper plot with something in the red column usually ends up costing more. Everything stays on your own device, and you can print or save each appraisal as a PDF without giving an email address.
Appraise your plot with the free tool
Found a plot you like?
Talk it through with Allan before you offer. One hour on Zoom, a written summary of the risks and your next steps.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Can I buy a plot of land without planning permission?
You can, and it is often cheaper, but you are paying for a possibility, and the price should reflect that. If you do, make the purchase conditional on getting permission, or agree an option to buy once permission is granted. Never pay building-plot money for land without consent.
How do I find out who owns a piece of land?
Use HM Land Registry. The free INSPIRE map shows registered freehold boundaries, and the title register costs £7 from GOV.UK and gives the owner’s name and address. Land that is not registered is harder to trace, and a local solicitor or the parish council is the best place to start.
How long does it take to appraise a self build plot properly?
The desk research and the site visit can be done in a day or two. The answers from the network operator, the water company and your solicitor take weeks, which is why it pays to start them as soon as a plot looks promising.
Is the Plot Appraisal tool really free?
Yes. There is no sign-up and nothing to pay. Your answers stay on your own device, and you can print the appraisal as a PDF. If you want the follow-up on the questions you have flagged, you can tick a box and leave your email, but you do not have to.
What if the appraisal throws up problems?
Most amber flags are simply questions still to answer, and each one tells you who to ask. Red flags are different. If you have one and still want the plot, talk it through before you offer. A one-hour strategy session with Allan will tell you whether the problem can be solved and what it is likely to cost.
