Matt Lenzie | Construction Capital

The regional planning gap: Q3 2026

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Approval rates diverged across seven regional groups in Construction Capital’s matched panel of 253 authorities in England and Wales. South West was the only group with an increase, from 75.84% in Q3 2025 to 79.09% in Q3 2026. The full-panel rate fell from 71.96% to 68.38%. This eight-slide presentation tests whether recorded unknown outcomes could reverse each regional direction. Six of seven directions survive the extreme-assignment test. East of England is the exception. These are deterministic sensitivity bounds, not confidence intervals. Coverage is partial, including only seven Welsh authorities. The comparison does not estimate a particular scheme’s chance of consent, and it does not correct for application mix, omitted decisions or later revisions. The ICPSR planning release contains the source tables, definitions and code. Download the regional backing-data package for the seven-row comparison, source CSV and reproduction script. The Google Slides master provides the same presentation. For wider context, see the Q3 London and South East market report. Construction Capital’s Development Finance guide explains how planning documents and other scheme evidence fit a funding proposal. This dataset does not estimate loan pricing or lender appetite. The planning-risk companion presentation examines approval decomposition and pipeline definitions. The Q3 research briefing connects the planning, sales and charge-activity studies. All share Construction Capital authorship. Matt Lenzie, Construction Capital. 6 October 2026. CC-DF-2026Q3-P04, a regional adaptation of CC-DF-2026Q3-01. Original presentation text: CC BY 4.0. Source-data rights remain as stated in the deposit. Construction Capital is a property-finance brokerage. Hosting does not imply peer review or institutional endorsement.

H1 2026 student accommodation finance: lender announcements and sold-price evidence

Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0400

A six-slide briefing from Student Accommodation Finance, shared through the Construction Capital account. Activity: January–June 2026. Evidence cutoff: 12 September 2026. Six selected financing announcements total £142.7m: £73.65m for development/refurbishment and £69.05m for investment/term refinancing, with three facilities in each group. This purposive sample is not total UK lending or cash advanced. The sold-price exhibit covers 19,871 general residential sales across eight English postal towns. These are not verified student properties, HMO comparables or PBSA valuations. Property mix, postal geography and registration lag limit the comparison. The exploratory Companies House screen retains 124 instruments across 57 companies. Instruments are not completed loan transactions and do not establish loan values. Full report: https://studentaccommodationfinance.co.uk/insights/h1-2026-student-accommodation-finance-report/ Methodology: https://studentaccommodationfinance.co.uk/reports/h1-2026/methodology.md Public aggregate data: https://github.com/mattylll/saf-h1-2026-student-accommodation-finance-data Underlying source rights retained. Source: published H1 report and methodology. The private transaction ledger was not re-audited for this briefing.

Reading the planning clock: England's residential decisions, 2025/26

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0400

What do planning decision-time statistics actually measure? This briefing examines 37,249 major and minor residential application decisions in England between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026, using MHCLG's PS2 open data. The analysis compares England with all nine regions and tracks the four quarters separately. It shows how the PA category, which includes Planning Performance Agreements, Extensions of Time and Environmental Impact Assessments, changes the population covered by the detailed elapsed-time bands. National Parks remain separately identified in the backing data. 80.2% of major residential decisions and 58.6% of minor residential decisions were in the PA category. Those shares are not delay rates. Detailed time bands cover the non-PA subset and cannot establish the average waiting time for all applications. The backing-data archive contains the original source CSV, three derived datasets, calculation code, methods, a claim ledger and checksums. The MHCLG source release and reporting guidance explain the collection and definitions. For the distinction between planning decisions and delivered homes, see our companion housing-pipeline study. Construction Capital's wider market reports provide the broader property-market context. Author: Matt Lenzie, Construction Capital, a commercial property-finance business. This descriptive analysis shares an official source vintage with the companion study and does not constitute independent corroboration or peer review. Original public-sector information: OGL v3.0. Derived work: CC BY 4.0.