With a bank holiday weekend and a birthday week away I can’t pretend it’s been a month too heavily focused on developments and the HMO portfolio, especially as I also managed to get my wisdom tooth out which turned out to be more painful than I had anticipated.

However, as I await the planning appeal decision for our latest HMO I have been spending more time on the development side of the portfolio. This month I have been looking at Permitted Development (PD) opportunities; mainly garages. In fact, I have been exploring a set of eight garages that would be perfect for development. They are located in a contentious area so I would be looking at the PD route. However, despite storage facilities having permitted development rights that have recently been extended we have hit a roadblock this month.

These specific garages are part of a development that is approximately 15 years old. I know this because I actually own one of the houses on the development and when I purchased the property I received all the relevant planning documentation relating to both the houses and the garages. We were all set to proceed on this site, however, on closer inspection it appears the council have put a restriction on the garages that in essence removes any PD rights. This has been a key lesson for future sites, especially if you are looking at PD. Even if a class use has PD rights check to see if they have been removed at any point. If they have then it changes the game completely.