Good faith in construction contracts

From Designing Buildings Wiki 28th Nov 2019 An obligation for parties to act in ‘good faith’ is not generally implied in commercial contracts. However, both standard form construction contracts and bespoke contracts commonly include clauses that require the parties...

HATC to join M3 Group

M3 and HATC are delighted to announce heads of terms agreement for HATC to join the M3 group from 1 September 2021. Published: 14 June 2021 The agreement between the M3 Board and HATC Managing Director, Andrew Drury will help to maintain the success of HATC as one of...

Study Material for Development Staff

I spent the first 15 years or so of my life in HA Development learning on the job. Then I started reading and discovered how much faster one can learn, and how very slow on-the-job learning tends to be. I quite often mention this on training courses. So I’m...

What’s your view on leasehold practices?

This is a copy of an article published on the RIBA website on 2nd August 2017  https://www.architecture.com/knowledge-and-resources/knowledge-landing-page/whats-your-view-on-leasehold-practices   A clampdown on leasehold abuses has been announced by Communities...

Why study Project Management?

I have worked almost exclusively in and for HA Development teams since the early 1980s. In my first 15 years I worked in 5 HAs, progressing from Development Assistant to Group Development Director of a regional HA, delivering lots of projects in the custom and...

Reasonable endeavours or best endeavours?

What is the difference between signing up to a “reasonable endeavours” obligation on the contract, and promising to make “best endeavours”? This article from Estates Gazette makes it clear. To summarise, promising to use “reasonable endeavours” to do something means...

Overview of valuation methods

Here are another very useful couple of articles from the Estates Gazette’s series “Mainly for Students”. These two articles provide an overview of the 5 main valuation methods, focusing on the single most important one – the Comparative Method....

Valuation: the normal margin of error

This article from Estates Gazette is a couple of years old, but still provides a useful description of the “expected” margin of error valuations. Valuation room for error To summarise, even for everyday street properties, of which there are many...

How are land deals structured?

This is a short note about the various types of structures that can be used to buy or sell land, and some of their pros and cons. This should be useful for all Development/Regeneration staff who are involved in buying land directly from landowners, or who may be...

Planning limitations vs conditions

See this useful attached article from the splendid Estates Gazette Practice & Law section last month. In short, the description of the planning permission granted may purport to limit what’s built, but unless the permission ALSO has a condition to the same...

This Government does Maslow – apart from housing.

  Maslow’s theory of the hierarchy of needs is a useful tool to help think about people’s needs from the most basic  to progressively higher levels of civilised life.  The model talks of the most basic needs as being physiological (having food, air, water,...

NEW….. Request-a-training-course!

We normally run our property development courses in-house, on demand. This works best for clients when there are 5 or more people wishing to attend. We can also run these courses when requested by individuals. We will generally need approximately 6 people to sign up...