Altair’s Latest Development Appraisal Toolkit – Podplan

 

A new financial year brings the need for organisations to revisit their base development appraisal assumptions, ensuring they reflect any updates to their wider financial plan and budgeting assumptions. Alongside this, new data sources such as house price inflation indices, cost inflation, Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rates and London specific rent level benchmarks are released. Altair’s Development Viability Team have, over the last 2 months, been spending time updating the Podplan models used by each of our clients, a group now totalling over 35 organisations nationwide, to reflect the above updates.  

Our Podplan clients range from local authorities, council owned local housing companies, other consultancies and community led trusts. This past year we were also delighted to onboard both the London Borough of Merton Council and Canterbury City Council, highlighting Altair’s commitment to supporting local authority development programmes.  

Podplan is a ‘discounted cashflow’ development viability toolkit specifically tailored for housing providers, developers, and investors. Users can quickly and easily assess the financial viability of a wide range of development scheme sizes, tenures (social and private) and project delivery routes. Project details are input on a single, easy to navigate input tab within a familiar Excel based format, and key assumptions and project cashflows (covering the build and asset holding periods) provide users with a range of financial and non-financial indicators to appraise projects. 

Our latest model (which we will be rolling out in the coming months) incorporates the latest relevant indices and data sources, Homes England’s updated affordability guidance for Shared Ownership, new ‘unit efficiency’ outputs, and new functionality allowing users to model a range of project delivery routes (e.g. land led and s106 package deals).  

As well as providing Podplan to clients we use it to support our wider development viability services. Over the last 12 months these have included: options appraisals of large London estate regeneration projects, viability modelling of potential housing regeneration options (including new build and infill) for a district council, assessment of the impact of block purchases for temporary accommodation, and analysis of modular home delivery options compared to traditional housing construction. 

If you’re interested in finding out more about Podplan or our wider development viability services, please contact David Howson on david.howson@altairltd.co.uk or visit our Development Viability webpage: https://altairltd.co.uk/service/development-viability/