5 Things I Learnt Working for the Berkeley Group – And How They’ll Make You a Better Developer
Ben Richards is the Director of Aura Architecture & Interiors and XP Property. In this article, he talks about the things he learnt while working for the property development company, Berkeley Group.
I was fortunate to spend three years working on some incredible Berkeley Group schemes in Battersea/Nine Elms via their subsidiary companies, St James and St William.
In this article I will share some of the key takeaways that I learnt whilst working as a Technical Manager with such an established and successful property development company.
‘Riverlight’ was the first project in which I got to see the later stages and occupation of a development and how customer care was at the forefront of the company ethos.
‘Prince of Wales Drive’ was only just being built out of the ground after years of preparation when I left to start my own business ventures. At this early stage, I was able to see just how much value can be added during the design and planning process – to the tune of almost £100m in our case. Read on to hear how!
For those of you that don’t know much about the Berkeley Group, it’s quite cutthroat, a high-performance and a high-pressure company to work for. They demand a lot from their employees, contractors and external consultants and that’s why they’ve been at the top of the development game for 40 years.
My role focused heavily on the design of our schemes so most of the tips below follow this and should be something you as the developer should be driving from your consultant team of architects, engineers and third-party consultants.
First of all, I’d like to explain how the company was structured into different work functions. I know this has helped my development business with how we build our internal teams, so I’ll elaborate in the hope that it helps with yours.
There were six key functions/teams:
· Land and Planning – Front-end land buying and obtaining planning permissions before being moved on to the delivery/operations teams.
· Technical – Would typically take on the projects with planning permission in place, tasked with optimising the scheme for added value and coordinating the sub-consultants (architects, engineers, interior designers, energy consultants, etc…) to provide the design packages.
· Commercial – Essentially the Quantity Surveying element and the team that would feed into the Land/Planning and Technical teams to ensure the overall budget is closely monitored.
· Build – The team of project managers on the ground overseeing the various contractors, health and safety on site, and reporting issues to the Technical/Commercial team to resolve.
· Sales and Marketing – Involved much sooner than you would imagine (even before breaking ground and three years before any apartments were completed in our case). Close liaison with the Technical team to create CGIs, marketing brochures, floor layouts and interior design specifications ready for sale off-plan (in the UK and overseas). On-site presence when possible via marketing suites.
· Customer Care – After-sales customer service and maintenance. The Berkeley Group are well known worldwide for the quality of product they produce, and the level of attention they give their buyers. It’s no wonder they find investment buyers asking for the marketing brochures on their next site ready to buy and buy again.
Think about these different functions in your property development business and if you aspire to grow, how you could mould your teams in a similar way.
You can see from above how the Technical team may feed in to almost every other function of the business at some point throughout the development lifecycle. It’s why I believe that good design should be such a large focus of your time as the developer.
You need to be the driving force behind your architect and consultants and not just rely on them to carry out the design for you. Challenge everything and ask ‘why’ they are designing it that way.
So these are my top tips to use in your own developments:
1. Focus on the customer journey outside
It’s not just what’s in the house/flat or what it looks like that will sell it. It’s how the landscaping and context invites you in. Access should be effortless with good wayfinding from the communal spaces.
On the large eight-year phased schemes I worked on, it was fundamental to think about the construction stages so that prospective buyers could access the completed blocks of apartments without being put off by dusty walkways, noisy plants and messy workers.
Tidy the bins up, offer to repoint the neighbour’s boundary wall if it improves the site entrance, pressure wash the driveways. It all adds up to that all important first impression.
2. It’s all about the customer experience and functionality when inside
Everything should have its place, i.e. space for a console table in the hallway with a shoe rack, his and hers hooks on bathroom doors, a utility cupboard to store your ironing board and drying rack. Your greatest success will come from someone that instantly imagines themselves living in your properties.
If you have a marketing suite or are staging the properties, you should focus on all the different senses. Not everyone’s main focus will be on what your apartment looks like.
Some may well remember the smell of the candles in the bathroom, the textured wallpaper they touched in the hallway, the way the underfloor heating felt on their feet, the calming background music. Try to appeal to all these senses.
And my favourite tip of all time: Your shower valves do not belong under your shower head! Nobody wants a cold arm when turning the shower on.
3. Improve your floor plate efficiency
This along with other design optimisation allowed us to take an 836-unit scheme to 955-units – within the same building envelope! These extra 119 units were worth close to £100,000,000 in development value (that’s a lot of 0s) for a paperwork exercise.
To do this, the goal is to get your NIA:GIA ratio up as high as possible. Above 85% is good but you should really target close to 90%, meaning there is very little wasted space in communal corridors, stairs, lift cores, etc., leaving more space for the good stuff: ‘NSA’ – Net Saleable Area.
Question whether you can have thinner walls, narrower stairs, a smaller lift shaft – whilst complying with building regulations obviously.
Bonus tip: you can also improve your efficiency by reducing the communal hallways and dead-legs within your apartments/houses.
4. Regularisation, regularisation, regularisation
This will save you hundreds of pounds, especially when you grow as a developer and start creating 10, 20, 100+ unit schemes.
By this, I mean creating repeating forms. This could be similar apartment layouts across multiple floors, the same 5-house types replicated across your land development (maybe with 5 different cladding choices), the same kitchen design (left and right-handed), or identical bathroom sizing and layouts in every flat.
On the two large schemes I worked on modular, bathroom pods were used to improve efficiency, reduce wet trades on site, improve the quality of product, and speed up installation times. These were shipped in completely finished, pushed in to position, and connected up to the waste pipes. Worth considering for larger schemes.
When you are doing small developments sub-10 units, you don’t notice the effect of this regularisation as much, but when the £1000 saving made on your kitchen design (due to replication) is factored across 100 units, you do the maths: that’s £100,000 saved. Fewer drawings, less mistakes, quicker installation – what’s not to like?!
5. Review the development mix
What I mean by this is understanding the number of 1, 2, 3, 4-bedroom flats in a development against the market demand, and also the location of the unit within the development.
Rearranging the location of certain units generated a huge uplift in value for us. Putting a 2-bedroom unit on the landscaped courtyard side of a development as opposed to a road facing side added £50,000 to the end value. So it made sense to move the 1-bed flat (which was courtyard side) to the road elevation where we only dropped £20,000 in end value by doing so. That simple switch created a £30,000 uplift in value.
Work with your marketing/sales team or agents here to get their input early in the design stage.
Bonus tip no. 6:
Don’t overlook storage! It’s part of the National Space Standards to include a minimum area size of storage. I’d implore you to go beyond this considerably as it’s a huge factor for buyers.
Whether you’re an SME developer turning one development at a time, or a large house builder churning out 100s of units a year, these tips should help you sell faster, build cheaper, and ultimately provide a better user experience that your buyers will tell their friends about.
Go get ‘em!
If you’d like to discuss your next property development with me, do get in touch at info@aurahomes.co.uk or ring 0203 189 1619.
I own an award-winning architecture firm in SW London (www.aurahomes.co.uk ), but also carry out my own property developments (www.XPproperty.co.uk) so I understand great design and the commercial aspects needed to generate healthy profits and saleable developments.