You are buying housing sites and you have found a new site to buy. And agreed a price with the landowner. You now want to submit a formal offer to buy the land but do not want to commit to the purchase until you are sure that a number of other 'things' have been dealt with. What would now be ideal is a site acquisition checklist.

These 'things' are called suspensive conditions and would typically include:-

• satisfactory site investigation reports you want to be sure that you can actually build on the land and also without incurring unexpected costs;
• satisfactory planning permission from the local authority  you can't build until you have this and the local authority may apply conditions that cause problems or unexpected expense;
• approval from your funders  you want to be sure that you will have the money to pay the purchase price and the construction costs.

The legal offer to buy the land can be issued subject to such matters.

Timescales
You should have some idea how long it will take to deal with these matters.

• The offer to purchase will usually say that the completion date for the purchase will be 7 -  14 days after you tell the seller that you have everything you need, but the seller won?t want this to be completely open-ended.
• The contract will probably include what is called a 'long-stop date'  this means that if you don't complete the purchase by that date then the seller can withdraw from the contract and sell the land to someone else so you need to allow yourself as much time as the seller will give you when agreeing to such a date.

You should also ensure that the wording in your offer allows you to waive such conditions if appropriate. This would allow you to complete the purchase before the seller gets the chance to walk away from the deal and sell to someone else.

• For example you could choose to disregard the suspensive conditions and proceed to complete the purchase if for instance you were not going to get your planning permission before the long-stop date, but thought that you were very likely to get it.

If you'd like legal advice about a site acquisition checklist or any other aspect of site acquisition get in touch with one of the team, who'd be pleased to help.