Promoting Residential Land

Vision documents have become the essential method of promoting land for residential development. Clearly, they have an important role in marketing sites, and they have become increasingly valuable in the process of identifying strategic development land at the pre-application stage of the planning process. Their value has greatly increased as the planning system has become more difficult to navigate and public opposition to development has become more organised.

As its name implies the pith of the vison document is in demonstrating that a development proposal is attractive, beneficial and deliverable. It provides a high-level summary of the characteristics of a site in terms of location and amenities, and access and topography; it includes an indicative scheme to illustrate the opportunities that stem from its inherent qualities.

In a planning regime that appears frequently to be targeted at preventing, rather than encouraging development, the vision document must provide a robust justification statement. In this respect it must anticipate potential objections and be underwritten by an analysis of the planning and environmental issues that are inherent in the site. It must show that the balance between the opportunities and constraints is overwhelmingly positive.

The task is to achieve a presentation that delivers factual information in a concise and attractive format that can be circulated both electronically and in hard copy. The document must be sufficiently authoritative to pass scrutiny by planning officers, and easily accessible to the non-professional reader.

From our experience in public consultations and planning inquiries, factual information is frequently misunderstood and architects’ drawings misinterpreted by objectors. The challenge is to distil a large amount of information into an easily comprehensible format and to use a diagrammatic form of illustration wherever possible to communicate urban design concepts.

Working with landowners, developers and housebuilders, Malcolm Payne Group has extensive experience in site analysis, feasibility studies and concept scheme design together with the graphic design, writing and illustration skills necessary to prepare compelling vision documents.