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Have you ever been out and about on site wanting to know the impact some abnormal cost will have on the profit margin or residual land value of piece of land?
We are currently trialling a new version of SDS Landval designed for smartphones. At present it works on Apple iPhones and iPads, all Google Android devices, and probably on the Windows Phone 7 once Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 9 for it.
Pricing has not been determined yet, but we are thinking along the lines of a monthly rolling subscription which you can terminate or pause given a month's notice, at a price range of less than £10 GBP per user per month.
Begin your free trial here:- Free Trial
Designed for the Facebook on iPhone generation, this application is designed to provide you with the most pertinent answers about your proposed housing development scheme given the least amount of input.
This application has two modes of operation:-
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• Displays the date and time of the last software update we rolled out to your device
• The expiry date of your trial version will be shown. Once expired, contact us for an extension, or a subscription if available
• Integrated help is always available
• The settings screen allows you to choose your units of site area measurement; acres or hectares, your floor area units; square metres or feet and configure your land taxes and subscription
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Each screen has a link to a help page which explains the data required.
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In settings you can set your desired land area units, floor area units and Stamp Duty Land Tax Rates. A button allows you to set the current SDLT settings in one simple action.
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This shows a list of the appraisals you have created. The number of units is also given.
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• Once an appraisal has been created, this is the main menu
• You can store as many appraisals as the device will allow (several hundred on the iPhone)
• The gross margin (GM) is always shown in the heading bar
• The number of housing units in the scheme is also shown
• And so too is the land value
• The Unit Summary section allows you to list out the housing units that you plan to develop on the site, and their expected net sales prices. This is the only assumed income for the scheme
• There are six costs sections; externals, abnormals, overheads, technical, marketing and acquisition fees (including VAT)
• There is a section devoted to land tax
• Finally the financial results are summarized on one screen. This is also where you enter the desired gross margin or specified land cost
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• Name the scheme
• Specify at least the gross site area
• Optionally specify the net site area available for development
• Optionally date the appraisal
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This screen shows the different unit types in the scheme. Also shown for each type is the floor area, sales price and the number of units.
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• Name the type of unit (e.g. Two-bed flat)
• Specify the floor area of the unit
• Specify the number of bedrooms and habitable rooms
• Specify the number of these units that will be built on this land
• Decide how you want to enter the financial figures for this type; by floor area, per unit, or as lump sums for the lot
• Specify the sales price, build cost and plotting density
• The summary at the top of the screen is constantly updated with the land value and gross profit margin
• Landval will also tell you how this type of unit compares with the other types of units in this scheme by assigning a rank. You can maximize the value of the land (or maximize yourprofit margin) by building more units of rank 1 than rank 10 for example. This will assist you to optimize your mix of units (if allowed by the local planners)
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This screen summarises the list of items relating to the cost of external works. A description for each item and its total is displayed.
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• This is where you define a particular cost, in this case relating to external works
• You can have as many items as you wish and they can be input in a variety of input options
• Similar screens are used to enter abnormal costs, site overheads, technical fees, acquisition and marketing fees
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• Set up tax bands for the acquisition price
• The "Set to current" buttone looks at the appraisal date and fills in the tax bands accordingly
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• This screen is divided into 3 sections
• The top section is where you can add a contribution to the land value, e.g. from the sale of an existing property acquired with the land
• Ordinarily the profit margin is defined for each unit, but here you can specify a profit margin for the scheme as a whole to derive a residual land value. Alternatively, you can specify a desired land value to display a residual profit margin for the scheme
• The middle section displays the main viability outputs. These can be displayed as a total, a % of sales value, per unit and per unit floor area
• The bottom section displays ancillary information. Various statistics relating to the appraisal are displayed, e.g. site cover, plotting density, etc
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This is the lower section of the screen. Various statistics relating to the appraisal are displayed, e.g. site cover, plotting density, etc.
• Knowing the residual land value or gross margin on site is fine, but when you are back at home/office you will want to do more work, and use a larger device (maybe a laptop or PC) to do so, for nobody wants to use a fiddly smartphone when there's whopping big 19-inch PC or laptop in the room
• Once you are subscribed, your appraisal will automatically be uploaded securely to our Google AppEngine service (if and when your smartphone has network access)
• Starting the application on any other device (smartphone or PC) will automatically download that appraisal from our Google AppEngine service
• From a PC you can export the appraisal to Excel, email it to a colleague or print it out on paper (yuk!)
• We are hard at work on the PC version which will allow you to forecast the income and expenditure in a development cashflow, estimate your development interest and calculate a net profit margin, IRR and NPV
