Buying from plan without regretting it

Buying a house that does not exist yet is a perfectly sensible thing to do. It goes wrong when a buyer treats a marketing document as a contract, and it goes wrong quietly, because nobody notices until completion.

The four questions

• Which floor area is in the agreement, and is it measured to the internal face or the centre line?
• Is the completion date contractual, with a longstop, or indicative?
• What is the specification substitution clause, and who decides what counts as equivalent?
• What happens to the deposit if the longstop passes?

On the Corvane scheme we mark every published figure as contractual or indicative, on the listing and in the particulars. It is not a legal service and it does not replace a solicitor. It does mean nobody is surprised.

Programmes move

Two of the six phase-two plots have already slipped a quarter. We publish the new dates rather than the old ones, including on this website, and we would rather lose a reservation than hold one on a date we no longer believe.