Take charge of creating your own home with custom build

There is now a new kid in your town to help you build the home of your dreams, called ‘custom build’. It is potentially one of the most significant policy changes to housebuilding we’ve seen for some time and better still it puts you in charge of creating the home you want. 

If you are a fan of Grand Designs and other property programmes and have always fancied building our own pad, but were fearful of the financial and emotional issues the build might cause, custom build could be the perfect solution for you and mean you have to make a lot less compromises. 

The initiative is backed by the government and aims to tap into the Brits new desire to build their own home. Custom build provides a plot of land which has all the services you need already built in as well as a developer who has already secured planning and priced out the cost of building different types of house designs for you to choose from. You buy into the custom build and the developer carries out the build on your behalf.

This means you don’t have to go searching for the plot of land or worry that your builder will disappear from site. You can secure finance to purchase the plot and pay for the build as it goes up and you don’t have to build on your own, there are projects and funding to help build several properties at a time through community builds.

The government is backing this initiative with finance and expects local authorities to run a registry which you can sign up to. This helps them identify how many people are genuinely interested in building what types of properties, where. Some of these are already up and running, while other self-build and financing companies are collating data from across the country, such as BuildStore.

Not only do the local authorities have to set up a register to identify levels of interest, they are also expected to make plots available for you to build on and some local authorities are already up and running. Cherwell council for example has a massive scheme available which has up to 1,900 plots available for sale for self-build through to custom build projects.

So if you are looking at buying your first home, but really want to build or you are thinking of trading down and can’t find anything that suits you, it might be worth finding out more about Custom Build and which areas plots and developments are available.

For more help and information about custom build, visit www.propertychecklists.co.uk or email your query to [email protected]