Affordable Housing Developers Editing and Proofreading Services

A scheme is viable or it is not, and the answer is produced by a spreadsheet whose inputs were chosen by someone who wants the scheme to happen. Build costs, sales values, rents, finance rates, void periods, the grant assumption — move three of them by five per cent each and the same site swings from a comfortable surplus to a shortfall that ends the project. Everybody in this sector knows that. The document has to acknowledge it.

We edit what affordable housing developers and providers produce — viability appraisals and their assumption schedules, funding and grant applications, business plans and development appraisals for boards, tenure mix and affordability justifications, planning obligation and section agreement submissions, resident consultation and information material, allocation and eligibility documentation, partnership and joint venture proposals, regulatory returns and standards submissions, and stakeholder reporting on delivery. Our editors work on the appraisal a funder or a board decides from.

The viability appraisal's assumption schedule is where an affordable housing case is either credible or optimistic, and its failure is presenting a result rather than a set of inputs. A surplus figure carries no information without the assumptions that produced it and their sensitivity. We work through these so every material input is listed with its value, its source and its date — build cost from a specific tender or benchmark, sales values from named comparables, rents against the relevant local figure, finance at an actual quoted rate — since an input without a source is an input somebody chose; so the three or four assumptions that actually drive the answer are identified and flexed, with the appraisal stating what happens at a realistic downside rather than at a token five per cent; so the point at which the scheme fails is named, because a board needs to know how much room there is before the difficult conversation; so contingency is separated from optimism, with what the contingency covers; so grant and cross-subsidy assumptions are stated as conditional, given that a scheme dependent on a grant decision not yet made is a different proposition from one that is funded; so programme assumptions are visible, as delay is the most common route to unviability and rarely appears as a line; and so the appraisal says what would have to change to make an unviable scheme work. Appraisals written this way get funded, and the ones that should not proceed stop earlier.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including appraisals, funding applications and board material. We are editors rather than development, valuation or funding advisers, and we offer no view on viability, assumptions or scheme deliverability. What we can do is make the inputs and their sensitivity visible above the result.