Selling Land in Thanet

• Fields on the edges of Margate, Ramsgate, Broadstairs, Westgate-on-Sea and Birchington that sit against existing homes.
• Land around Minster, Monkton, Cliffsend and St Nicholas-at-Wade on the drier ground.
• Sites of a few acres that could be built in one or two phases.
• Yards, depots and former commercial land inside or next to a settlement.
• Land within walking distance of Thanet Parkway or a town centre.

Land isolated in open farmland, well away from any settlement, is harder under S5, and we will tell you plainly if we think that applies to yours.

• An outright sale. You sell the land as it stands today, privately or at auction. The price is what a buyer will pay for it without planning permission, and the buyer takes on everything that follows.
• A conditional contract. You agree a sale now, but it only completes if planning permission is granted. Until then you keep the land, and the agreement sets out who applies for permission and who pays.
• An option agreement, the route we use. We agree your price at the start, in writing, set above what your land is worth today. We then pay for and run all of the planning work, at our own cost and risk. If permission is granted, we complete the purchase and you receive the agreed price on completion. If it is not, you keep your land and owe nothing.

For land that needs planning permission before it is worth more, an option means you know your price before any work starts and never spend a penny on planning. The ways to sell land for development, compared sets out each route in full.

The 2020 plan allocated large strategic sites, including around 2,000 homes at Westgate and further growth at Birchington, Minster, Margate and Westwood, as well as Manston Green and land at Nash and Haine Roads. Several are tied to road schemes named in the plan itself: the Westwood Relief Strategy, a developer-led scheme that includes a link between Margate Road and Westwood Road, and improvements to the A256 from Lord of the Manor, which developers pay towards in proportion.

At 70%, Thanet is under the 75% threshold, so policy S5 of the National Planning Policy Framework applies. It supports homes beyond a settlement boundary where a site sits well against a town or village and local roads, drainage and services have room for the extra homes, unless the harm would substantially outweigh the benefits. In a district with no Green Belt, that test reaches every farm edge from Birchington round to Cliffsend.

Why Smaller Sites Matter Here

Completions have picked up to around 800 a year over the last two years, but that is still well short of the 1,106 a year the government now expects of Thanet. Sites of a few acres on the edges of Minster, Monkton or Birchington that can be built in one or two phases, without waiting for a relief road, close that gap sooner. We back that argument with a realistic build programme showing how quickly homes on your land could follow a permission.

Short of Five Years, by the Council's Own Count

The plan passed its fifth anniversary in July 2025, so the yardstick for its supply is no longer the 2020 plan's requirement but the government's standard method. Its interim supply statement, updated in January 2026, finds 3.7 years of deliverable land at 31 March 2025:

The statement's yearly figure is higher than the 1,106 quoted when the new plan was launched. The statement names the March 2025 affordability data behind its number, and the standard method is rerun as new data appears, so the launch figure most likely comes from a later calculation. On either figure the shortfall runs well past a thousand homes. For a landowner, that means two separate measures point the same way: policy S5 treats a delivery result under 75% as showing unmet need, and a supply under five years is further evidence of it, to be weighed with the rest. The council's monitoring page still lists the January 2026 statement as its current one, so a position measured at March 2026 has yet to appear.

The 2020 plan describes the countryside beyond the towns as predominantly Grade 1 agricultural land, with lower grade land only in small, isolated pockets that are often at high risk of flooding. When it was adopted, a councillor noted that more than 8,000 of its homes were on Grade 1 and 2 land around Westgate, Birchington, St Nicholas-at-Wade, Monkton and Minster. Farmland quality is weighed in every decision, but where almost all the land around the towns is top grade, it cannot rule out development on its own.

Flood risk sits in particular places. The plan says extensive areas to the south and west of the district carry high flood risk linked to former marshland and the old Wantsum Channel, and that the areas at risk are otherwise confined to the very edges of the coast. Away from those areas, the plan finds little flood risk. Our guide to flood risk and development land explains how the flood zones affect a site.

Manston

The former Manston airport site sits in the middle of the district. The 2020 plan safeguards it for airport related uses, following the development consent order for its reopening, and says its future use will be settled through an early review of the plan. Land nearby can be affected by the plans for the airport, including potential noise, and we check this carefully for any site in the area.

If you are thinking of selling farmland on the edge of Westgate, Birchington or St Nicholas-at-Wade, its Grade 1 status is something a scheme has to plan around rather than a reason to stop.

Not every opportunity in Thanet is a field. The towns contain yards, garage courts, workshops and long rear gardens that can take new homes, and plots inside them come under policy S4, which starts from yes and needs substantial harm to justify a refusal.

The main questions on urban plots are access for vehicles, the privacy and light of neighbours, and heritage. The 2020 plan counts around 2,000 listed buildings and 27 conservation areas in the district, so a scheme in the historic centres needs a careful layout and design. A Cliftonville garage court or a Ramsgate workshop yard is the sort of plot covered on our yards and brownfield land page.

For an owner selling a plot inside one of the 27 conservation areas, that design work is where most of the effort goes, and we carry it at our cost.