Property developers: what to decide before June 2027

A residential developer usually reads its sales effort through three reports that never quite meet. The marketing report counts enquiries and the cost of each one. The sales team's report counts viewings and reservations. The lender's monitoring pack counts exchanges, completions and the cash behind them. The three cannot be added together, because an enquiry received in November may reserve in February and complete eighteen months later.

The common failure is that budget follows the first report. Portal enquiries and paid social lead forms have made enquiries cheap to generate, so cost per lead tends to look better each quarter. Whether those enquiries book viewings is a separate question, and few developers can answer it by source, because the enquiry and the reservation sit in different systems with no shared identifier. A channel can halve its cost per lead and double its cost per reservation in the same period, and the marketing report will show only the first change.

The fix is to report by enquiry cohort. Take every enquiry received in a given month, keep its source, and follow that same group through viewing, reservation, exchange and completion as the months pass. Cost per reservation by source then becomes a figure finance can check against the sales register, and it is the figure that should set next season's channel budget.

The UK market leaves little room for waste. House prices rose 1.4% in the year to July 2026, to an average of £273,000, and an estimated 97,000 residential transactions completed in July 2026, 1.1% fewer than a year earlier. London prices fell 3.3% over the same year, and London flats and maisonettes fell 6.6%. A developer selling apartments in London is pricing against a falling market for the product it builds, which makes the cost of each reservation, rather than the cost of each lead, the number that decides whether a phase pays.

Most developers and agencies treat portal dependence as a cost problem and open with the renewal negotiation. Their weaker position is usually the data. When an enquiry arrives through a portal, the portal holds the search history, the saved listings and the buyer's other enquiries. The developer receives an email with a name, a phone number and a free-text message. If that email is answered from a shared inbox and logged in a spreadsheet, the business cannot later show which portal, development or listing produced a reservation.

The order of decisions matters. Cutting portal spend before measuring reservations by portal risks removing the channel that supplies the buyers who complete while keeping the one that supplies cheap enquiries. Measuring first takes three changes that cost little. Every enquiry enters the CRM with its source and the development it concerns. Every enquiry records the time to first response. Every reservation carries the identifier of the enquiry that led to it. After one full sales cycle the developer can bring evidence to the renewal: reservations and completions per portal, and the cost of each.

Owned channels are the other half of the decision. A development website with live availability and its own enquiry forms keeps a first-party record of the buyer, and it reduces dependence only if the enquiries it produces are answered as fast as portal ones, which is why time to first response belongs in the same report as cost per reservation.

Foreign buyers are a small share of national housing statistics and a large share of some developers' order books, and board papers often confuse the two.

In Türkiye, 127,410 homes were sold in August 2026, 14.7% fewer than a year earlier. Sales to foreign nationals were 1,938, almost unchanged on August 2025 and 1.5% of all sales. Between January and August 2026 foreigners bought 13,141 homes, 6.3% fewer than in the same period of 2025. Read nationally, foreign demand looks marginal. Antalya alone recorded 599 sales to foreigners in August 2026, close to a third of the national figure, followed by Mersin with 143. Russian citizens bought the most homes that month (343), followed by Ukrainian (147) and Iranian (140) citizens. For a coastal developer in Antalya, the national 1.5% says very little. Its exposure is to a handful of nationalities whose buying depends on visas, payment routes and exchange rates that can change within a quarter.

The planning consequence is concentration risk. If most reservations at a development come from two or three nationalities, the sales plan needs a view of each: the language of the sales material, the payment and transfer route, the documents a buyer from that country needs, and how quickly the team replies in that language outside office hours. The same applies to developers selling UK homes to Gulf buyers, or Gulf off-plan units to European ones. Demand from one nationality is a segment with its own lead time and fall-through rate, and it should be reported as one.

Off-plan sales are where marketing claims turn into contract terms. A completion date, a specification, a view or a rental figure used in an advert can become the basis of a buyer's complaint if the contract or the finished building differs.

In Dubai, Law No. 8 of 2007 requires a developer selling off-plan to open an escrow account for the project, into which off-plan buyers' payments are deposited. The same law prohibits a developer from advertising off-plan units in local or international media, or promoting them at exhibitions, without written authorization from the Dubai Land Department. A campaign aimed at Gulf or overseas buyers therefore has a permit step in its timeline, and an advert that runs before the permit is a regulatory problem, whatever it achieves in enquiries.

In the UK, developers registered with the New Homes Quality Board work to the New Homes Quality Code. The reservation agreement must give the buyer a cooling-off period of at least 14 days, during which the buyer can cancel for any reason and receive the full reservation fee back. If the developer makes a major change after reservation, meaning one that alters the size, appearance or value of the home, the buyer can cancel within 14 days of being told in writing and recover every payment made. Version 2 of the Code, dated March 2026, sets the exchange deadline at no less than six weeks after reservation unless the buyer asks for an earlier date.

Two practical points follow. A reservation inside its cooling-off period is a provisional sale, and a marketing report that counts it as a sale on the day it is signed overstates any month in which cancellations rise. And every claim used in advertising should sit in a register with its approval, its source document and the contract clause it matches, so that a change in specification can be traced to every advert that described the old one. Legal sign-off of those claims stays with the developer's lawyers. The register lets them review everything in one place.

Lenders ask for the same core figures every month: sales progress, cost to complete and evidence for the next drawdown. Many developers assemble them by hand from a reservation list, the quantity surveyor's cost report and the bank statements, and the figures fail to reconcile in a predictable place.

The sales register records what buyers have paid. Where off-plan payments go into a project escrow account, as Dubai law requires, that money is held for the project and released under the escrow rules, so cash collected from buyers and cash the developer can spend are different numbers. A monitoring pack that reports collections as though they were free cash flatters the funding position, and the lender's monitoring surveyor tends to find the gap before the borrower does.

The remedy is one dataset with three linked registers. The sales register runs by unit and stage: reserved, in cooling-off, exchanged, completed or canceled. The cost register runs by package, with committed and paid amounts. The cash register runs by account and separates escrow, client and operating funds. The lender pack then refreshes from those records, and every figure in it traces to the line behind it. We build this reporting inside clients' own systems, and FINMETRA, the financial-data product we are designing, is intended to make the same kind of decision-ready reporting easier to stand up.

By the end of December 2026, decide which report sets the channel budget. If it is cost per reservation by enquiry cohort, the CRM needs a source field on every enquiry and an enquiry identifier on every reservation from January, so that the spring selling season produces usable cohorts.

Before any portal renewal in the first quarter of 2027, decide what evidence you will bring to it. One full cycle of reservations and completions by portal is enough to negotiate on facts. Without it, the renewal is a negotiation about list price alone.

Before the spring 2027 launches, decide how foreign demand will be reported. Hold nationality and language as fields, report reservations and fall-through by nationality, and agree a response-time standard for each language the sales team covers.

Before the first off-plan advert of 2027 runs, name the owner of the claim register and the person who signs it off. In Dubai that includes the advertising authorization. In the UK it includes reporting reservations net of cooling-off cancellations.

By June 2027, decide whether the lender pack is assembled or generated. If the monthly report still takes several days to put together, the next facility negotiation is the moment to move it onto linked sales, cost and cash registers, so that borrower and lender read the same numbers.