Latitude is an independent real estate & urban development advisory. We help landowners, investors and developers decide what to build — and whether to build at all — before capital is committed.
Start a conversation →For landowners and investors, before anything is committed. What the land can carry, what the market will absorb, and what the numbers have to look like for the project to stand up.
For European investors or developers with a future project in the region. We act as your owner's representative on the ground, and we are accountable for the programme, the schedule and the relationships.
For developers who have the land and need the scheme to be right. We are not architects. We are the owner's judgement on the design, and we hold the plan to the standard that makes it liveable and sellable.
By the time an architect is appointed, the decisions that determine whether a development succeeds have already been made. What the land can carry. Who the buyer actually is. What the phasing costs. Whether the municipality will follow. They are made early, quickly, often on instinct — and they are the cheapest to get right and the most expensive to reverse.
Rather than a portfolio: what was in the way, what was decided, and what it produced.
A two-hectare gap site fifteen minutes south of Toulouse, sitting between two completed subdivisions — and inside the protected setting of the Canal du Midi, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The land was held in four separate ownerships, including the commune itself and a competing developer, and no party held enough of it to build anything alone. It had stayed undeveloped for that reason, not for any reason to do with the market. The initial programme was fifty homes.
Work completed at HECTARE as Developer & Project Manager. Co-owners and adjoining parties anonymised.
Establish whether the scheme could be consented and started at all, given the ownership structure and the number of parties with the ability to stop it. If yes, deliver it.
Four owners with divergent expectations, one of them the consenting authority and one of them a competitor with every reason to slow the file. A site inside the protected perimeter of a UNESCO World Heritage site, which placed the scheme under the binding authority of the French state heritage architect — a veto over materials, roof pitch, colour and layout, exercised without any obligation to accommodate a developer's programme. Network capacity below what the programme required, which cut it from fifty homes to thirty-three before design had begun. A social housing quota and an imposed typology mix, neither of which shrank with the programme. And an organised group of neighbours who did not want the site developed at all, at any density.
The de-densification was the worst of them. A two-hectare site needs the same spine road, the same drainage and the same connections whether it carries fifty homes or thirty-three. €520,000 of civil works and €85,000 of studies did not shrink with the programme; they simply had to be carried by a third fewer units.
Fragmented ownership is not the reason a site cannot be developed. It is usually the reason it has not been developed yet — which is a different problem, and a solvable one.
Two European investors, neither of whom had bought anything in Asia before, with land identified at Ungasan on the southern tip of Bali. The transaction was not a sale but a lease transfer, and neither the chain of title nor the remaining term was clear from what they had been shown. They were close to committing.
Advisory and owner's representation. Clients anonymised at their request.
Southern Bali is karst. The excavation set both the build cost and the programme — and it is the stage a remote owner never sees.
Tell them whether the opportunity held, and if it did, match the project to what they could actually afford to carry. Then take it through to a delivered, letting asset.
The project had to be profitable and photogenic at the same time, and those are usually opposing pressures. On a short-stay rental the visual appeal of the product is not decorative — platform photography is what drives the booking rate, so the finish is a yield input with a cost attached to it. Spend too little and occupancy never reaches the assumption the model rests on; spend too much and the payback period stretches past the point where the lease term makes it worth doing.
The lease term set the outer limit on how long the payback could be allowed to run, which meant the specification decision and the title question were the same decision. That is not how it had been presented to them.
In an unfamiliar jurisdiction, the return is decided by the documents long before it is decided by the design.
Market notes, site studies and observations from development work in France and Southeast Asia. No newsletter, no gated downloads.
