Selling Land in Sandwell

• Vacant or underused yards, depots and works in West Bromwich, Oldbury, Tipton and Wednesbury, including land with a history of contamination.
• Garage courts, backland and large gardens in Smethwick, Blackheath, Cradley Heath and Rowley Regis.
• Fields and paddocks in the Green Belt at Great Barr and around the Sandwell Valley that may qualify as grey belt.
• Land you have inherited with a family business or an old works, and would rather sell than run.

On a Sandwell site the expensive work comes early: ground investigation, remediation strategy, noise and access studies, or on a Green Belt field the grey belt evidence. Every cost of that work falls to us, and the option price is agreed with you before it starts. Owners dealing with an estate can read our inherited land page first.

• 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 Delivery Test 2025 counted 1,583 homes built in the borough over three years against 4,632 needed, a shortfall of 3,049. The council's Housing Delivery Test action plan of April 2025 shows how long the pattern has run: net completions fell from 1,162 in 2006/07 to 340 in 2022/23, recovering to 647 in 2023/24, and the plan notes that completions have been below target every year since 2015. It gives two main reasons:

• Too little spare land. The plan names "a lack of suitable vacant and surplus land, ground conditions and the lack of funds to assist with site assembly" as the main barriers, and records that demand for employment land has held back brownfield land that might otherwise have come forward for homes.
• Costs that many sites struggle to carry. Developers and agents surveyed by the council described long and expensive remediation, sale values too low to give a sufficient return, and sites in fragmented ownership that need assembling.

The Land Supply the Council Last Published

The council's five-year supply sits inside its land availability assessment of September 2024, base date 1 April 2024, which was still the latest on its assessment page at 4 November 2026. Because the Black Country Core Strategy is more than five years old, it tests supply against local housing need from the government formula rather than the strategy's own target:

On our own arithmetic, the deliverable homes fall roughly 5,800 short of the requirement.

What the Two Measures Mean for a Site

Under the national framework of August 2026, a Housing Delivery Test result below 75% means unmet need is treated as evidenced for policy S5, the route for land well related to a settlement and capable of being served by roads, schools and drainage, and below 85% a 20% buffer is added, as the council already does. A supply short of five years is separate evidence of unmet need to be weighed, not an automatic finding. Neither measure cleans contaminated ground or moves a business.

The Green Belt holds the borough's only fields of any size. Policy S5 does not apply there; grey belt housing first needs evidence of need, which a result under 75% or under five years of supply normally provides, and Sandwell has both today, with the Golden Rules on larger schemes. LUC divided the Green Belt into 31 parcels, and its summary table marks 16 of them as grey belt. Those 16 range from under 4 to about 29 hectares, while the six largest parcels, each of 60 hectares or more, were not. On our own arithmetic the 16 add up to about 221 hectares, roughly 545 acres; the Express and Star reported on 7 October 2026 that around 580 acres could be classed as grey belt, and that council planners said most of it could not be built on. The study says land it identifies as grey belt "should only provisionally be considered as such", and its disclaimer states that it "does not identify green belt land that should be built on".

Peak House Farm, Great Barr

The council refused an outline scheme for up to 150 homes and a countryside park on land north of Wilderness Lane in Great Barr, at Peak House Farm, and on 2 August 2024 an inspector dismissed the appeal. He recorded the council's supply as "1.4 years" against the four-year requirement that applied, but attached "substantial weight" to the harm to the Green Belt and found no very special circumstances. The whole site is a Site of Importance for Nature Conservation, and the decision predates grey belt. In the October 2026 report the council's strategic planning and transportation manager described Peak House Farm as "the only major site of greenbelt that is in private ownership which is vulnerable to development", adding that it "didn't come out as grey belt in the assessment".

For an owner selling greenfield land in Sandwell, the need test is already met, so the case rests on the part the field plays in keeping towns apart and on any nature designation over it, which is where our grey belt guide begins.

While the first plan waits for its report, Sandwell Local Plan 2 is being prepared under the new plan-making system, and the council's timetable for it sets these dates:

The council's call for sites for the second plan ran from July to 30 October 2026, seeking land for housing, employment, Traveller sites and green infrastructure, including off-site biodiversity net gain. The next chance to shape that plan is the consultation the timetable sets for January 2027.

A Forecast Tied to Adoption, Not Today's Supply

The October 2025 housing note forecast a supply of 5.10 years in 2026/27, but only on the plan's own requirement of about 700 homes a year, which applies once the plan is adopted, rather than the formula's 1,550. It is a forecast prepared for the examination, not a current supply figure: the council's published figure remains the 1.86 years in its last assessment, and the plan has not been adopted. The Housing Delivery Test 2025 was issued on 17 August 2026, and we do not predict the next.

For timing, that means sites inside the towns and grey belt fields can be looked at now, while larger sites that need an allocation belong in Sandwell Local Plan 2, which our guide to local plans and calls for sites explains stage by stage.