'We Buy Any Land' Companies: How Fast Cash Land Buyers Work and What They Pay

The model is best known from the housing market, and several firms that buy houses for cash now buy land as well. The plain description of the model comes from the firms themselves. Each one publishes its own terms on its website, and three of them, read in October 2026, set out the pattern clearly.

Three features run through all of them. The buyer is a cash buyer, so there is no mortgage lender to satisfy and no chain of other sales behind it. The buyer takes the land as it is, without asking the seller to clear the yard, deal with the planning or market the site. And the buyer meets the costs that would otherwise fall on the seller, such as the legal bill, so the seller receives the price without deductions.

Where a published page explains how the price is reached, it points to the discount. Springbok, writing about the housing side of the same trade, puts it in one line: such a buyer's entire margin is in the discount. Council advice for owners of empty properties describes it the same way. Westmorland and Furness Council, in its guidance on selling to a property buying company, says such firms promise a quick sale, from as little as 10 days in some cases, and that they offer below market value.

A land sale, however quick, goes through the same legal stages as any other. A cash buyer shortens them by removing the parts that usually cause delay: there is no lender's valuation, no wait for a mortgage offer and no chain. What it cannot remove is the legal work on the title.

1. The offer. The firm looks at the land from maps, records and sometimes a visit, and makes a cash offer. Firms publish offer times from 24 hours upwards.
2. Solicitors are instructed. The buyer has its own solicitor and you have yours. Even where the buyer pays your bill, your solicitor acts for you alone.
3. The title is checked. The buyer's solicitor reads your register at HM Land Registry, the boundaries, rights of way, covenants and any mortgage, and makes its searches.
4. Exchange of contracts. Once both sides sign and exchange, the sale is binding. Before exchange, either side can still walk away.
5. Completion. The money is sent through the solicitors and the land is transferred. The buyer then registers itself as the new owner.

The stages that slow a land sale are the ones no buyer controls. Land that has never been registered needs its deeds gathered and checked. A mortgage over the land has to be dealt with as part of the sale. An estate needs a grant of probate before a sale can complete. A tenant or grazing licence needs dealing with before the buyer can take possession. Where none of those applies, a cash sale in a few weeks is realistic; where they do, the timetable follows the paperwork rather than the advert.

A cash buyer is a trader. It buys land, holds it for a time, and then sells it or puts it to use, and the difference between the two figures pays for its money, its time and the risk it has taken on. Because the firm is giving up the use of its cash and accepting land it has not had long to examine, the price it offers is pitched to leave room for that return. That is why Springbok's guide and Westmorland and Furness Council's advice to owners both describe a discount rather than a premium.

The starting point for the price is the land's value today in its current use: a grazing field as a grazing field, a yard as a yard. In valuers' language this is existing use value, and the extra a buyer might pay for the chance of planning permission is called hope value. Our guide on how the price for your land is worked out explains both terms. A cash buyer that pays for hope value takes the risk that planning never comes; one that does not pay for it keeps the whole of any gain if planning does come.

• Condition matters. Land with problems a buyer must solve, such as contamination, no road access, an unresolved boundary or a sitting tenant, is priced for the work and risk of solving them. Quick-sale firms advertise that they will take such land, and the price reflects it.
• Size matters. A small, odd-shaped parcel has fewer buyers on the open market, so a quick cash offer may be the only offer on the table in a short time.
• Rights over the land go with it. A public footpath, a neighbour's right of way or a restrictive covenant does not end when the land is sold: it binds the new owner too, so a buyer prices in whatever the land is burdened with.
• The figure can move. Westmorland and Furness Council's guidance for owners mentions the risk of an offer being reduced once a sale is agreed. Springbok's page says the same for houses where a survey finds something material.

None of this makes a cash sale wrong for every owner. It makes it a particular kind of sale: the owner is paid for the land as it is now, quickly and with little effort, and leaves the future of the land to the buyer.

A sale transfers the land and everything that comes with it, including its prospects. If the council later allocates the field for homes, or a planning application succeeds, the value of that permission belongs to whoever owns the land at the time. A seller who completed a quick sale the year before has no claim to any of it, because the contract was for the land as it stood.

The one exception is overage, sometimes called clawback, which is a promise written into the sale contract to pay the seller a further sum if a defined event, such as planning permission, happens within a set period. It only exists if it is agreed at the time of sale and properly secured. Our guide to overage explains how it is drafted and secured; here it is enough to say that a quick cash sale contract does not include it unless both sides have written it in.

Seen from the seller's side, a quick sale exchanges the chance of a later uplift for money now. For an owner who needs money now, and whose land has no realistic planning prospect, that can be a fair exchange. For an owner whose land does have a prospect, the question is who pays for and carries the planning, which is where the routes in the table further down differ most.

Action Fraud, the national reporting centre for fraud, describes land banking scams as schemes in which small plots of agricultural land are advertised on the internet or over the phone as investment opportunities. Victims are told that once planning permission is granted the land can be sold to a developer at a profit, although in reality there is often virtually no development potential. The Insolvency Service, which can ask the court to close companies in the public interest, described the same pattern in January 2015: members of the public sold almost worthless pieces of land with the promise of returns once planning permission is granted, permission that will never be agreed because of the nature or location of the land.

What the Supreme Court Decided

The leading case is Asset Land Investment plc and another v The Financial Conduct Authority, decided by the Supreme Court on 20 April 2016. The company bought adjoining parcels of greenfield land at South Godstone in Surrey between February 2006 and October 2007, divided them into plots and sold the plots, in sales that usually began with a cold call, to some 300 to 400 investors, before moving on to sites at Liphook, Lutterworth, Newbury, Harrogate and Stansted. The judgment records that the South Godstone site was in the Green Belt and that a valuation report for the regulator in March 2013 recorded that it had little prospect of development.

The question for the court was whether this was a collective investment scheme under section 235 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. The section covers arrangements that let people share in the profits from property where they do not have day-to-day control of its management, and where either their money is pooled or the property is managed as a whole by the operator. Each investor legally owned a plot. The court held that the relevant property was the whole site, not the individual plots, and that the investors did not have control over their investment. The FCA summarised the outcome in its press release: Asset Land had operated an unauthorised collective investment scheme, with investors paying between £7,500 and £24,000 a plot on the promise that the land would rise in value with planning permission or rezoning.

What the Regulator and the Criminal Courts Have Done

The FCA does not regulate the sale of land. It does regulate collective investment schemes, and a firm must be authorised to promote or operate one. In another case, the FCA reported in October 2020 that the director of a scheme that sold plots from two sites marketed as Cheltenham Manor, promising to obtain planning permission and negotiate with a developer, had been convicted in October 2016 of conspiracy to commit fraud, sentenced to four years in prison and disqualified as a director for seven years. Around £3 million had been invested between late 2009 and May 2011, and the FCA said it would only be able to return a small sum to investors.

For a landowner the two are easy to tell apart, because a landowner is never the investor in a land banking scheme. The owner who sells a whole field to a scheme operator is paid the price agreed for the field, under an ordinary sale contract. The people at risk are the plot buyers. The plot buyers' difficulty is also a practical one: a field held in dozens of separate ownerships can only be sold or developed as one if every one of those owners agrees. In the Asset Land case the company also kept the roadways, access points and other common parts of the site, which one of the judgments gives as a reason the plot buyers had no day-to-day control over it, and the judgment records that none of the later sites had been allocated for development.

Your own solicitor. The buyer's solicitor acts for the buyer and cannot act for you as well, so you always have your own. That is true whether the buyer is a cash firm offering to pay your legal bill or a developer contributing to it: who pays the bill does not change who the solicitor works for. Our guide on whether you need a solicitor to sell land explains what they do at each stage, and why the writing rule in the Law of Property (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1989 means nothing is binding until a written contract is signed by both sides.

The register. The register at HM Land Registry is the official record of who owns registered land. A sale or a mortgage of that land is recorded on it, and so is any agreement over your land, such as an option. Whatever a buyer says or promises, the register shows the position.

Protection against title fraud. HM Land Registry's guidance on protecting land and property from fraud lists the circumstances in which an owner is more at risk of someone trying to sell or mortgage their property fraudulently. Several of them describe a great deal of farmland.

• The property is empty, as most fields and many yards are.
• The property is not mortgaged.
• You rent the property out, for example on a grazing licence.
• You live overseas.
• Your identity has been stolen.

Two free steps are available to owners. HM Land Registry's Property Alert service sends you an email when someone applies to change the register of a property you are watching, for up to 10 properties, with no fee; it does not block anything on its own, so you act on the alert. And an owner who does not live at the property can ask for a restriction on form RQ, also with no fee, which stops a sale or mortgage being registered unless a conveyancer or solicitor certifies that the application was made by you. Neither has anything to do with whether you sell, or to whom. They simply make sure that nobody can sell your land but you.

Inheritance Tax and Probate

Executors face a fixed date. GOV.UK's guidance says inheritance tax must be paid by the end of the sixth month after the person died, and HMRC charges interest if it is paid late. For an estate whose main asset is land, that deadline can look as though it forces a quick sale. Often it does not, because tax on land can be paid in ten equal yearly instalments, and for assets inherited from 6 April 2026 that qualify for agricultural or business relief those instalments are interest-free. The same guidance adds that the tax becomes payable in full once the land is sold. Our guide on inheritance tax on farmland works through the reliefs and the instalment rules in detail.

Probate sets its own order of events. Executors can talk to buyers and agree terms, but a sale cannot complete until the grant of probate has been issued, and every executor who took out the grant must sign. Our guide on probate and selling land sets out the steps. A cash buyer cannot shorten that part of the timetable either.

Debts, Arrears and a Sale That Has to Happen

Where a debt is secured on the land, the mortgage has to be repaid or released as part of any sale. Where the debt is elsewhere, the question is simply how much is needed and by when. For some owners the honest answer is that a quick sale of the land is the right thing to do, and the speed of a cash buyer is worth what it costs.

There is a middle course that families sometimes miss. Where land is large enough, or has distinct parts, it is possible to sell one part to meet the deadline and keep the rest. A yard or a paddock with no planning prospect can be sold quickly for what it is, while a field that may have a future for homes is kept and considered separately. Your solicitor can draw the new boundary on a plan, and the part that is sold gets its own title at HM Land Registry.

The open market column is there because it is the ordinary way to sell land today, privately through an agent or at auction, and our guide on the four ways to sell land for development covers it, together with conditional contracts and promotion agreements.

1. A desktop review. We look at your land from records and maps: the constraints, the access, the likely number of homes, the council's position and the costs a scheme would carry. It costs you nothing and commits you to nothing. We do not contact the council, your neighbours or anyone else about your land without your agreement.
2. A price agreed at the start. If the land has a case, we agree a price with you, set above what the land is worth today in its current use and written into the agreement as a figure. The heads of terms set out the price, any option fee, the land included and how your legal and agent fees are covered.
3. Your own advisers. You appoint your own solicitor and land agent, and we work with whichever ones you choose. We contribute to their fees, so it costs you nothing to get it done properly. Our solicitors register the option on your title.
4. The planning. We pay for and run all of the planning work, at our own cost and risk. On a larger site that spending can reach £300,000. The agreement continues while any planning application or appeal is being decided, and you keep using the land throughout.
5. Completion. If permission is granted, we complete the purchase and you receive the agreed price, on completion, with milestones set out in the agreement. Nothing is advanced to you to be taken back later.
6. If planning is not achieved. The agreement ends, you keep your land and you owe nothing.

Set beside a quick cash sale, the difference is in where the land's future sits. A quick sale hands the land and its prospects to the buyer now, at today's value or below. Our route agrees a price above today's value at the start, leaves the land in your hands while we carry the cost and the risk of planning, and completes only once planning permission has been secured. Every stage is set out on our how it works page.

• Land a quick sale suits. A parcel with no realistic prospect of homes, such as a strip deep in open countryside, a piece cut off from any road, or land the owner simply wants rid of. Here the speed of a cash buyer costs little, because there is little future value to give up.
• Land an option suits. A field, paddock, yard or set of barns on the edge of a town or village, where homes might be accepted under the council's plan or national policy. Here the future value is the point, and the question is who pays for the planning that brings it out.
• Land that needs both. A holding with one part that must be sold to meet a fixed deadline and another part with a planning case. The two can be dealt with separately.

Owners are often unsure which group their land is in, and that is the gap a free desktop review fills. We look at your land from public records and maps and tell you plainly whether it has a planning case. That answer is useful whatever you decide to do with the land.