Four owners, a rival developer and a UNESCO veto
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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.
The mandate
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.
What we did
- Mapped the ownership before the design. Four landholdings, four different reasons for holding, four different definitions of a good outcome. The deadlock cut both ways: no party could develop alone, which made agreement the only route to value for any of them.
- Removed the competing developer rather than negotiating with him. A rival at the table turns every subsequent decision into a two-party decision, over a programme not yet defined. We bought his position out above what it was worth to him standing alone — a premium paid once, at the start, rather than conceded slowly over three years.
- Ran the remaining negotiation bilaterally. More than thirty meetings across twenty-two months, one relationship at a time, including private access rights with adjoining owners. A joint session at the outset would have turned three private positions into three public ones.
- Worked to whoever could decide, not whoever held the file. With a heritage authority, a network operator and a commune each holding a veto, the distance between the nominal contact and the actual decision-maker is measured in months.
- Reset the product instead of defending the density. When network capacity capped the unit count, we redesigned upward in quality — larger plots, higher specification, a mix carrying the reduced volume on price rather than on number. The heritage requirement went into the design brief at the start rather than after a refusal.
The difficulty
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.
Outcome
- 11 houses, 6 apartments, 16 serviced plots of 371 to 601 m²
- €3.0m in land disposal, on two hectares
- 30 months from first contact to completion, of which 8 months of civil works
- Consented without appeal · Delivered · 90% sold
What this shows
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 first-time investors, an unclear lease, and a villa at 85% occupancy
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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.
The mandate
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.
What we did
- Read the paper before the pitch. Reviewed the contracts and the land deeds, traced the chain of title and established what the remaining lease term actually was — the single fact the whole return depended on, and the one least clearly presented to them.
- Recommended a personal holding structure rather than a PT PMA. A foreign-owned company is the reflex answer in Indonesia and the wrong one at this scale: the compliance cost and reporting burden would have consumed a meaningful share of the yield on a €125,000 project.
- Sized the product to the investors, not to the site. The land could have carried more. Their capacity to fund a longer build and a longer void could not. We set the programme against the second constraint.
- Defined the architectural and landscape brief with the architect, then held the design to it — on the owners' side of the table rather than the designer's.
- Modelled the return on seasonal occupancy, not on an annual average. Bali's high and low seasons produce very different numbers, and an annualised assumption is how these projects are mis-sold.
The difficulty
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.
Outcome
- €125,000 total project cost, delivered in full
- 85% occupancy achieved
- Capital payback projected at five to six years
- Two first-time investors in Asia who had hesitated for a long time, and did not lose money learning
What this shows
In an unfamiliar jurisdiction, the return is decided by the documents long before it is decided by the design.
