Shropshire Farming Talk: Top tips for lotting farm sales in Shropshire

There will be many buyers who are just interested in the principal house and its grounds but are not in the market for acres of farmland.

Equally, there will be those interested in the commercial farmland but not the residential element.

These potential buyers may well discount the residential element if the property was only offered for sale as a whole.

Lotting a farm or estate gives you the relative value of each asset, which can be extremely useful to the seller.

When it comes to buyers, they can see the breakdown and easily compare lots, rather than debating how a multi-million-pound guide price for the whole property was reached.

Finally, selling in lots enables deals to be done: there will be parties who have funds available to buy the main house and the adjoining acres, but don’t have the assets or indeed the motive to take on all of the farmland.

Here are our top tips for lotting sales:

1. Lot sizes – create different sizes to suit different budgets, and attract more buyers to your sale.

2. Order of sale – secure the sale of your main lot before agreeing offers on the others.

3. Water and access rights – take care to account for cross rights between the lots.

4. Know thy neighbour – local interest in your land should play a big part in deciding how to lot up your property. Neighbouring farmers are often very keen to buy the bare land in order to add to their existing holdings and achieve economies of scale, although care should be taken not to limit your options to just sales to neighbours.

5. Home is where the heart is – account for the requirements of current house hunters when creating residential lots. Knowing the main house and its surrounding parkland is tailor made for a potential buyer on the books all contributes to how the property is packaged up for sale.

6. Lotting farms and estates is an art not a science – too few lots, and you risk confining the buyers’ pool to a limited number of people. Too many lots, and you risk discouraging that one buyer, who could be interested in buying the whole, but is put off by the prospect of having to buy too many lots, often in strong competition.

7. Competition is healthy and often helps a seller to achieve the highest price. Creating competition between bidders on the whole and a combination of bids for the individual lots is an important part of the sale process.

On the flip side, sometimes farms don’t lend themselves to lotting, such as if they are subject to tenancy, or they better lend themselves to being ring fenced, for example.

Savills has recently launched two farms in Shropshire. White Abbey Farm in Alberbury near Shrewsbury is a ring fenced, livestock and arable investment farm extending to about 140.89 acres; and Sallins Farm in Picklescott near Church Stretton, is a significant livestock farming enterprise with land extending to about 441 acres.

by Rhydian Scurlock-Jones, rural director at Savills in the West Midlands