Land Development Editing and Proofreading Services

Ninety houses are built and forty of them cannot be occupied, because the second access road has not been constructed and a planning condition says no more than fifty dwellings may be occupied until it is. The condition was agreed three years earlier. Everybody knew about it. What nobody had was a single document tying each obligation to the plot number it stops.

We edit what land developers and promoters produce — phasing and infrastructure trigger schedules, planning condition compliance schedules, section agreement and obligation trackers, serviced land and plot sale documentation, infrastructure delivery and adoption documentation, utility and connection programme documentation, land assembly and option agreement summaries, promotion and joint venture documentation, technical due diligence packs for land sales, and reporting to funders and joint venture partners. Our editors work on the schedule that ties an obligation to a plot.

The phasing and trigger schedule is the document that governs whether a development can be occupied and sold, and its failure is listing obligations without connecting them to what they block. A planning condition schedule organised by condition number is a compliance document; a developer needs to know what stops plot 51. We work through these so every trigger is expressed as the specific event it blocks — occupation of a numbered plot, commencement of a phase, first sale, opening of a road — rather than as a stage of development, since "prior to occupation" means nothing until somebody says whose occupation; so each obligation names what must be delivered, by whom, and the lead time it actually needs including any adoption or technical approval period, because a road built to standard and not yet adopted still blocks occupation in some conditions and not in others and the difference has to be read; so the critical path through the obligations is identified, given that the binding constraint is often a utility connection or a technical approval rather than the construction; so anything requiring a third party is flagged with what happens if they are slow; so the schedule states which obligations can be discharged in advance and which cannot; so the cost and the bond or security attached to each is recorded; and so the schedule is maintained as a live document with the discharge evidence attached. Schedules written this way stop the forty finished houses.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including agreements, planning documentation and commercial information. We are editors rather than planning, engineering or legal advisers, and we offer no view on conditions, obligations or compliance. What we can do is connect every obligation to the plot it blocks.