The mechanic, written out so there is nothing to discover later

Week one

The brief comes in and we read it against a simple question: could we recognise a site that fits this, in the field, without asking you again? If we could not, we come back with questions before anything else happens. Most briefs need one round of that.

The area matters more than anything else in the document. "South East" is not a search area. Three named towns, or a run of postcodes, or "within twenty minutes of this junction" all are. Where you have a hard boundary — a labour force, a framework contract, a sales office — say so, because that boundary is usually the most useful line in the brief.

Then we set the search running: agents who hold instructions they have not yet marketed, owners with buildings that are costing them money, receivers and asset managers with disposal lists, and direct approaches we make ourselves. Class E buildings sit high on that list, for the reason the free checker exists.

The direct approaches take one of two routes. Where HM Land Registry’s corporate ownership data shows a company as the proprietor, we know who owns the site before we write, and the letter says so. That dataset is a periodic snapshot and can be out of date, so the letter also asks to be corrected — and where we are corrected, we close the file. Where the register shows nothing we can rely on — and a lot of small commercial property is held personally — we work from Companies House to the business and its directors, and we ask whether they hold the freehold rather than assuming it. Two different letters, because they are two different situations.

What you receive

When something fits, you get a written note with the address, the tenure position as we understand it, the use class and the evidence we have for it, the planning history we can see, the constraint layers that bite, and the price expectation if one has been given to us.

The note separates two things carefully, because the difference is where money is lost:

• What we have verified — read from a document, a register, a published designation, or stated in writing by the party with authority to state it. The source is named.
• What we have not verified — an agent's statement, an owner's recollection, a floor area from a listing, a use "everybody knows" the building had. It is marked unverified and it stays marked until a document lands.

We do not send a scheme. If a massing sketch helps you picture the envelope, it is labelled illustrative massing and it is not a consented scheme, because it isn't one.

First look

Every site we surface goes to one developer at a time. Not a shortlist, not a bidding round. You get the building, the ownership position as we understand it, and the owner’s response before anyone else sees it.

You hold it for 14 days. Long enough to visit, check the planning history and run your numbers. If you pass, it moves on.

First refusal follows the order briefs were taken. If someone else is already briefed on your patch, they see it before you do. That is the whole reason to be early.

A decline is a useful outcome and it costs you nothing. Tell us which part failed — the area, the size, the tenure, the planning risk, the price — and the search gets sharper. Briefs that improve are almost always briefs where the buyer said no with a reason attached.

If you want longer than 14 days, ask inside the window. Where the vendor position allows it we will extend, and where it does not we will tell you plainly that we cannot hold it.

Fees

A campaign fee of £3,000 to run the brief. If you buy a site we introduced, an introduction fee of 2% of the purchase price applies, and the campaign fee is credited against it in full — not partly, not against a minimum, in full.

If you buy nothing, the campaign fee is what the search cost you. We would rather write that sentence here than have it discovered at the end of three months. What a campaign does and does not buy is set out in the terms of use.

End of three months

A brief runs for three months. At the end, one of three things is true.

1. You are buying something. The search stays open on the same brief until that transaction resolves, at no additional campaign fee.
2. You saw sites and declined them all. We give you the reasons back — what came up, what you rejected and why — and you decide whether to renew with a rewritten brief. A brief that produced ten declines is usually a brief with one wrong parameter, and it is normally the area or the price.
3. You saw very little. That is our result to own, and we will say which part of the brief the market did not answer. Sometimes the honest answer is that what you are describing is not currently coming up in that patch at that price.

Nothing renews automatically. There is no rolling authority, and there is no tail on the introduction fee beyond sites we actually introduced to you in writing.

What we do not do

• We do not act for the vendor on the same site. The introduction fee is paid by you, and it is the only fee on the transaction we take.
• We do not give planning advice, valuations or legal advice, and the free tools do not either. You will need a planning consultant, a valuer and a solicitor, and the good ones pay for themselves in the first fortnight.
• We do not promise a site. A search that guarantees an outcome is selling something other than a search.