There’s a phrase that regularly does the rounds in property circles, and it tends to crop up whenever the market shifts or when someone has spent a few months searching without any luck. “All the good deals have gone.” It sounds plausible on the surface, even logical. If more people are entering the market and competition is increasing, then surely the opportunities must be diminishing? And yet, every year, developers quietly and consistently continue to buy sites, secure planning, and complete profitable projects. Not just seasoned professionals, but newcomers too. Because believe it or not, even people entering the space for the first time are still getting deals done. So which is it? Have all the good deals gone, or are they still out there? The answer, of course, lies elsewhere entirely, because the truth is that deals don’t simply exist waiting to be found. They aren’t sitting neatly packaged on a portal, ready for someone to stumble across them. Deals are created, and once you understand that distinction, everything changes.
For many would-be developers, the journey begins (and often ends) on the portals. Hours spent scrolling through listings and reaching the same conclusion time and time again: it doesn’t stack. On the face of it, this seems like due diligence, a sensible place to start. But it’s also where many people fall into a trap. Most of what appears on the open market has already been seen. Commercial agents don’t operate in isolation, and the moment a potentially viable site comes into their hands, it’s often circulated, formally or informally, to known developers, the people with whom they have relationships, who have track records, and who can move quickly. You can safely assume that, by the time a property reaches the portals, there’s a reasonable chance it’s already been assessed and, for one reason or another, dismissed. Either the numbers didn’t work, the planning potential wasn’t strong enough, or the vendor’s expectations were simply too high. That doesn’t mean every portal deal is unviable, but it does mean that if your entire strategy is based on waiting for something to appear online that just works, you’re likely to be disappointed, and over time, that disappointment can harden into a belief that there are no deals to be had.
When people say a deal doesn’t work, that’s not strictly true. A more accurate assessment would be to say that it doesn’t work at the asking price. Vendors frequently pin their assumptions on optimistic figures, sometimes based on outdated comparables, sometimes on emotion, and sometimes simply because they can afford to wait. But a price isn’t a deal; it’s a starting point, and the mistake inexperienced developers make is treating it as fixed and non-negotiable. They run their appraisal, see that the margin isn’t there, and move on. An experienced developer approaches it differently. They will often ignore the asking price entirely at the outset and focus instead on a far more important question: what could this property become? Because until you understand the true potential of a site, the price is largely irrelevant, and it’s in answering that question that the process of creating a deal begins.
The first lever in that process is almost always planning. Not just in the formal sense of submitting applications, but in grasping the art of the possible. This is where knowledge begins to separate those who see opportunities from those who don’t. Permitted development rights have transformed what can be achieved with existing buildings, whether that’s offices to residential, light industrial to residential, upward extensions, or changes of use. And each of these can unlock value where none previously existed. The real skill, however, is not just in being aware of individual PD rights, but in how they can be combined, used in sequence, or layered intelligently to maximise output. A building that looks limited on the surface can, with the right approach, become something entirely different, and that transformation is often where the deal is created.
