Choosing your unit mix from market evidence, not habit
Most developers have a house-type habit — the mix they always build. The evidence often disagrees. The local data can tell you, before a single planning drawing, which products earn the best rate and which sell fastest — not always the same thing.
Three numbers per product
- £/sqft by type. Detached usually earns the highest rate — but not always by enough to beat more units of something denser. Compare the evidence per type, indexed to today.
- Depth of demand by bed band. Count the transactions: an area doing 300 three-bed sales a year and 40 five-bed sales is telling you where the buyers are. Averages without counts mislead.
- Absorption by product. Nearby schemes' sales rates, split by what they were selling. Fast-selling smaller homes can beat slower premium units on finance cost alone.
The revenue-per-acre lens
The mix decision is really: £/sqft × buildable sqft per acre × absorption. A product earning 8% less per foot but tolerating 30% more density often wins on land value. Run the residual for two or three candidate mixes rather than defaulting.
Watch the supply pipeline
If three nearby schemes are all delivering the same 3-bed semi, your identical product competes on price and incentives. Evidence of what's been absorbed is also evidence of what's about to be saturated — differentiation has a £/sqft value that shows up in the comp sets of scheme after scheme.
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Start free trial →Data referenced in Threshold is displayed under the Open Government Licence (HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, EPC Register, ONS, UK HPI). All figures produced by Threshold are statistical estimates for site appraisal, not RICS valuations.