We’re proud to announce that we’ve raised £2.3m in funding from Fuel Ventures, bringing us one step closer to our mission: to transform house building in the UK by changing how property professionals source their development land, and ultimately build more homes to satisfy housing demand. 

With our new investment, plans include to accelerate new product development, integrate new land and property datasets and further automate the platform; helping property developers to source, validate and acquire off-market sites even faster. We’ll also be growing the Searchland team!

Searchland was created in 2020 to offer the land and new homes industry a better one-stop-shop of land and property planning information. The founding team include Mitchell Fasanya; previously Co-Founder and CTO of Fanbytes, Hugh Gibbs; experienced land & planning consultant, Archie Kennedy-Dyson; previous Co-founder & CTO of a global virtual queuing app, and Arthur Goodhart; former lead data scientist at an optic sensor start-up.

Searchland’s foundations: a core team made up of four experts

Mitchell and Hugh saw, from first-hand experience, the challenges and complexities of accessing planning data and analysing sites for new homes developments. As Mitchell confirms:

“Having tried to find a site of my own to build on, I discovered there was very considerable friction in the land-sourcing process."

The team found that developers were having to trawl through a myriad of clunky databases to find sites. Existing digital tools were prohibitively expensive for the majority of developers and were also failing to help them to get round the antiquated site sourcing process. As a result, even though the property industry was rich in planning data, it wasn’t being leveraged fast or effectively to meet housing demands.

‍By bringing together their joint expertise in planning, data, and software, the team was able to create a powerful online platform offering developers, architects, planners and land sourcers a more comprehensive and - importantly - easy to use source of land and property information.

Last year, we were backed by the Geovation Accelerator Programme, where we grew the platform and the team. In just under a year, Searchland has become the land and property industry’s most sophisticated and powerful software for UK land sourcing. 

‍The latest, most reliable data in one useful platform

By integrating all planning, ownership, and policy datasets in one place, Searchland has made the process of finding land both fast and intuitive. So far, over 418,000 potential development sites have been saved on the SearchLand platform by our customers.

We’ve officially captured the most reliable and relevant data across England and Wales, helping property professionals to make quicker and better informed decisions when sourcing property and land.

Site sourcing is a time-consuming task, and we’ve also been able to save property professionals hundreds of working hours in sourcing sites, cutting our client costs identifying land opportunities by up to 60%.

We’re also the only platform that automates the whole site sourcing process, from start to finish, even down to contacting landowners directly from the platform. So far, over 12,000 letters have been sent out via Searchland’s integrated letter app.

‍Plans for our £2.3 million funds

Housing secretary Michael Gove has now confirmed that targets remain in place for building 300,000 new homes per year, however, it is well acknowledged that these have been missed in recent years. Mitchell comments:

“We want to help further streamline the whole site sourcing process, so that developers can focus on what they do best – building homes”. 

With the £2.3 Million funding now in place, our plans for 2023 include:

Integrating even more datasets for England and Wales, making it even easier for property companies to carry out their planning due dilligence.

We're including more digitisation and automation, to make it even faster for our customers to find and validate the most relevant sites.

New features in the pipeline also include deploying our Land Assembly tool, which will let users draw their planned development plots in detail, helping unleash more land and future profits - so important in these challenging times.

We're also forging into new markets, and expanding our land and property planning data to cover Scotland.

In addition to investing in our platform, we'll be making new senior hires in the coming months. This adds even more in-house expertise to our amazing team, who already include experts in development and data management, business partnerships and sales managers, marketing and UX design.

‍The future of land and property sourcing

Having focussed on meeting the challenges of the property development market, we’ve attracted and earned the trust of some industry heavy hitters. Our 300+ clients include national and SME developers, architects, planners, land and new homes agents and renewables developers.

Mark Pearson, founder of Fuel Ventures confirms:

“Searchland has created a powerful and highly scalable product that is set to become the industry standard for land sourcing, thanks to its customer driven approach and speed of innovation." 

We are gearing up to make Searchland the face of UK land sourcing in 2023!  Our clients and stakeholders will be well placed to meet the ongoing challenges of the UK housing market.

Want to find out more about the fastest growing land and property sourcing platform in the UK? We're always happy to chat - simply get in touch with our team.

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