Feasibility to Completion: The Stages of a Property Development

A property development runs through eight stages, from the first feasibility appraisal to practical completion and handover. On a mid-sized commercial scheme in the North West, expect roughly 2 to 4 years end to end, with planning alone taking 6 to 12 months once you count pre-application advice. Get the early stages wrong and the late ones make you pay for it.

We have run projects through this sequence since 1992, on everything from town-centre refurbishments to funded new-build. The stages barely change from job to job. What changes is how much trouble each one stores up if you rush it.

What are the stages of a property development?

Most of the industry maps the journey to the RIBA Plan of Work 2020, which splits a project into eight stages numbered 0 to 7. It is the common language architects, engineers and surveyors all price against, so we structure our appointments around it too. Here is what each stage actually means when you are the one funding it.

Stage 0 to 2 is where the money spent is smallest and your leverage is largest. Stage 4 onwards is the reverse, where the money is largest and your options are nearly gone. That imbalance is the single most important thing to understand about the whole sequence, because it tells you where to concentrate your attention and your budget.

Why does the feasibility stage decide the whole project?

Because feasibility is where you find out what the site will and will not let you do, before you have spent real money. A proper appraisal tests the planning risk, the ground, the access and the numbers together, as one picture rather than four separate optimistic guesses. Skip it and you buy problems you cannot yet see.

I will not let a client submit for planning before the intrusive ground investigation is back. Plenty of developers do, because a boreholes contract costs a few thousand pounds and pushes exchange back by a fortnight, and the site looks fine on a desk study. That is the most expensive money you will ever save on a job. We learned it the hard way on an early scheme where we took a desk study at face value, exchanged, and then found made ground and old mill foundations sitting right where the new pad foundations were meant to go. The redesign and remediation cost many times what the survey would have, and it came out of the client contingency in the first month. We commission intrusive investigation before exchange now, without exception.

If you are weighing up a site right now, a feasibility appraisal is the cheapest insurance on the table. Our project management team can pressure-test a scheme before you commit a penny to it.

How long does planning permission actually take?

The statutory clock is 8 weeks for a minor application, 13 weeks for a major one and 16 weeks where an Environmental Impact Assessment is required, all set by the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) Order 2015. Real timelines run longer, because pre-application advice, statutory consultation and discharging conditions all sit outside that headline clock.

In Stockport the picture is sharper than most. A lot of the live opportunity sits inside Town Centre West, the regeneration area run by the Stockport Mayoral Development Corporation, where design and heritage expectations around the Underbanks, Chestergate and the railway viaduct are high and a pre-application conversation is close to mandatory in practice. Budget for it. A major application here is realistically 6 to 9 months from the first pre-app meeting to a decision notice, and then more time again to discharge the conditions attached to that consent before a spade goes in the ground.

What changes once the Building Safety Act applies?

If your building is 18 metres or more, or has 7 or more storeys, and contains at least two residential units, it is a higher-risk building under the Building Safety Act 2022. That triggers the Gateway regime, and you cannot start construction until the Building Safety Regulator approves your Gateway 2 application.

The statutory decision period is 12 weeks for a new higher-risk building. In practice the published figures through 2025 and into 2026 show median determination times far longer, closer to 22 weeks, with a large share of applications rejected first time for incomplete information. So treat 12 weeks as the floor, not the plan. The regime also hard-wires the CDM 2015 duty holders into the approval: the client has to declare that the appointed principal designer and principal contractor are competent before the Regulator will even validate the application. Our CDM and health and safety team works inside that from Stage 2, rather than being bolted on when the build is already priced.

What does the construction stage look like on the ground?

This is RIBA Stage 5, and it is the longest and most expensive stretch of the whole development. Cost control here lives or dies on two lines most clients skim past: preliminaries, the cost of running the site rather than building it, which sit at roughly 8 to 15% of construction cost, and the contingency, usually 3 to 5% early on and falling as the drawings firm up.

The build runs under a formal contract, usually a JCT or an NEC4 form, which sets out how variations, delays, payment and completion are handled once the programme starts to move.

And it always moves. A steel package slips, a statutory connection is late, a Greater Manchester winter quietly takes its days out of the programme. Holding the programme and the cost plan together while that happens, and reconciling the cost management every single month, is the difference between a project that lands on budget and one that discovers its overrun at the final account. On a funded scheme it matters even more, because a lender monitoring surveyor tests each drawdown against real progress on site. Our fund monitoring work makes sure the money released matches the value actually built, which protects the lender and the developer at the same time.

What happens at completion and handover?

Completion is not the day the scaffold comes down. Practical completion is a formal certificate that the works are finished bar minor snags, and it starts two clocks at once. The first is the defects liability period, usually 12 months, during which the contractor comes back to put right anything that emerges. The second is the final account, the last reconciliation of what the job truly cost against what was priced and instructed.

You also take handover of the operation and maintenance information, and on a higher-risk building the golden thread of safety information the Building Safety Act now requires you to keep. Get that pack wrong and you inherit a building you cannot properly run, insure or later sell without a fight. This is Stage 6 running into Stage 7, and it is where a well managed project quietly proves it was well managed, and a rushed one finally shows the joins.

The one rule that holds across all eight stages

The cheapest place to solve a problem is upstream of it. A week of real feasibility saves a month on site, and a month saved on site saves a year of dispute at the final account. Every stage in the list is really just an argument for taking the previous one seriously.

If you are at the start of a scheme, or partway through one that is starting to drift, talk to us before the next stage locks in. Tell us where the project is and we will give you an honest read on what the next stage should cost and how long it should take.