A plain house with a large garden turned into four apartments, three of them pre-sold. GDV £3.8m.
Transaction facts
| Service | Development |
| Location | Parsons Green, SW6 |
| Change of use | House to four apartments |
| Works | Around £800,000, including a full basement excavation |
| Exit | Three of the four pre-sold before completion; GDV £3.8m |
The brief
A house with nothing to recommend it but its garden. No character, no basement, and no obvious reason for anyone to pay a premium for it — which is exactly what made it worth buying.
What we did
We bought it and obtained consent to convert it into four apartments, with around £800,000 of works. The important decision was to dig. Excavating a full basement created an entire additional apartment out of ground nobody had counted, and the scheme then extended at ground and first floor to make proper use of the garden frontage. All of it was designed to sit quietly alongside its neighbours: on a residential street in Parsons Green, a scheme that looks like it belongs is a scheme that gets consented.
The result
Three of the four apartments were pre-sold to downsizers before the work was finished, against a gross development value of £3.8m. Pre-selling takes the sales risk out of a development, but it does something more useful than that: it tells you during construction whether you have read the buyer correctly, while there is still time to act on the answer. Here the answer came back from the people we had designed for.