Selling Land in Reigate and Banstead

• Fields and paddocks in the Rural Surrounds of Horley that sit against the edge of the town.
• Green Belt land around Redhill, Reigate, Merstham or Banstead that is enclosed by housing, roads or the railway and may count as grey belt.
• Yards, nurseries, depots and other previously developed land, inside or outside the Green Belt.
• Large gardens and backland plots inside the built-up areas, where policy S4 favours approval.
• Land within an easy walk of a station with a frequent service.
• Larger holdings that could help meet the much higher target the new plan must find room for.

Land up on the North Downs, where parts of the borough fall within the Surrey Hills, is the hardest case, and we will say so. Wherever your land sits, the planning work is ours to fund: access, drainage, ecology, landscape and Green Belt evidence. We fix the price in an option before any of that starts, above the land's value today. You keep using the land, and without permission it stays yours with nothing owed. Small parcels are welcome too, as our page on paddocks and small sites explains.

• 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 Housing Monitor 2026 measures supply at 1 April 2026 against the Core Strategy figure of at least 6,900 homes between 2012 and 2027, or 460 a year. It keeps that figure although the Core Strategy is more than five years old, because the council formally reviewed the strategy in July 2019 and again in March 2024 and found it did not need updating. The calculation runs as follows:

Five years at 394 comes to around 1,970 homes, so the council is roughly 360 homes short on its own method. The buffer has nothing to do with the delivery test, which the borough passes. The monitor applies it under the national rule that, from 1 July 2026, adds 20% where a requirement reviewed and found not to need updating sits below 80% of the standard method. The credit for past oversupply is the council's own judgement, and it does a lot of work in the result.

How the Figure Fell

The June 2025 monitor found 5.6 years at 1 April 2025 but forecast 4.51 a year later, as the council's Oakley Farm committee report of November 2025 records, and the reserve of urban extension sites was declared "now released for development" under policy MLS1. Scrutiny minutes a month later give it as 4.6; the outcome, 4.08 years, was lower still.

What a Shortfall Does for a Field Here

Under policy S5 of the August 2026 framework, a supply short of five years is evidence that homes are needed on land past the edge of a town or village. It is not an automatic approval: the land must be well related to the settlement beside it, and roads, schools and drainage must be able to cope. S5 does not reach Green Belt land, which in this borough means most of the countryside. Green Belt land has its own test instead. Homes on grey belt are only acceptable where need is shown, and a supply short of five years is one of the usual ways of showing it, so grey belt cases for housing are open here in a way they are not where a council has a full supply. Our guide to grey belt land sets out that test and the Golden Rules that follow it.

Horley did more of the borough's recent building than any other area, with 34% of completions in 2025/26 against 12.1% in Reigate, and much of its greenfield growth came from the Horley North West Sector. Its countryside is also the least protected. Asked at the 2019 examination whether the Rural Surrounds of Horley should become Green Belt, the inspector concluded that "exceptional circumstances do not exist and there is insufficient justification" for it. The land stayed as countryside beyond the Green Belt, and it is where policy S5 has real reach while the supply stays under five years.

Gatwick's Northern Runway

Gatwick won development consent from the Transport Secretary in September 2025 to bring its northern runway into routine use alongside the main one, with the airport able to handle up to 80 million passengers a year. Around Horley, the airport and the strategic business park the plan allocates west of Balcombe Road (HOR9) bring jobs, while aircraft noise shapes where homes can go on a site and how they are built.

For an owner selling a field in the Rural Surrounds of Horley, the runway is a layout question more than a reason to stop, which is why our noise evidence comes early on any site there.