Why is a Planning Assessment/Check beneficial prior to purchasing a property?

Are you looking at either building a house or are you considering purchasing a property? Where do you start? It can be quite daunting right.. especially if you don't have the knowledge or experience of doing this before. There are many headaches that can arise throughout the process.

Lets demonstrate how a planning check may benefit you...

You that you now have enough money to get into the property market and notice that there are some properties with potential that you might consider looking into, to either purchase as an investment or for your future home. You decide to contact the Real Estate agent to set up a viewing where you then go and visit the property and decide that it has a lot of potential. It has an area where you want to situate your building platform so you can make the most of that amazing view of the surrounding mountains and the beach in the near distance. You decide that this is "the one" and start the process of conducting your due diligence, although it wasn't very thorough because you are inexperienced and you 'don't know what you don't know'. You then go through the process of a sale and purchase agreement and then purchase the property.

Once you have purchased the property you then start the process of getting an architect to draw up the designs for your house which can be very expensive. With your "go ahead" the architect then lodges the drawings with the local Council as a Building Consent application. Council then processes the application but then identifies that the land is in fact prone to Coastal Flooding or Sea Level Rise and there are a lot of requirements to have it approved, otherwise it is going to be refused by Council. It now becomes apparent to you that your 'dream home' begins to spiral into a 'nightmare home' as your so called 'budget' goes out the window with excruciating engineering and consultant fees, resource consent applications, time and lots and lots of money. By this point you are seriously struggling financially as the 'dream home' does not seem feasible anymore and you just want to get rid of it.

What would have been a suitable solution for these issues you might ask yourself?

All you needed to do was contact a planning consultant at the start of the process, before you signed off on the purchase of the property. But you were too excited and who could blame you, so you didn't do enough due diligence.

A simple Planning Check/Assessment would have provided you with the following information:

- A thorough planning analysis of the property information.

- Assessment of the surrounding environment.

- Assessment of your proposal against the Council regulations.

- Indication of natural hazards, such as that 'Sea Level Rise' issue that you should have been made aware of at the start.

- Indication of the Development Potential of your property, such as where you can locate your 'dream home' or whether it has future subdivision capability.

-Any other significant matters such as associated costs.

This information would have saved you from going down a very time consuming and stressful pathway to then find out that you cannot do your development anymore. Which you then ended up selling at a substantial loss. Suddenly a few hundred dollars for a Planning Check/Assessment seems rather ideal in comparison to tens of thousands of dollars that you have so far lost.

Save your money, save your time, save the headaches and get a Planning Check/Assessment first. It will help you more than you will realise.

Contact us today for a comprehensive, cost affordable and high quality Planning Assessment/Check.