Project updates, practice news, and the occasional hot take. You might just find the spark you’re looking for.
More developers are building with JSA than at any point in the practice's history. Some are putting up their first scheme. Some have delivered dozens. The brief changes every time, but the reason they call doesn't.
Among the recent additions is Boxton Homes, a Nottinghamshire developer building individual, high-specification new homes across the East Midlands, with a portfolio running through Derbyshire from Codnor to Smalley. Their schemes lean toward characterful one-off houses rather than volume layouts, which is its own discipline: every plot is read on its own terms. They came to JSA for the reason most developers do. They wanted a scheme that gets approved, builds to budget, and sells.
That is the job. The rest is detail.
You're not hiring an architect to draw
If you develop property, you know what a building looks like. You aren't paying for inspiration. You're paying to move a site from "we own some land" to "we have planning, a buildable design, and a return" without the programme slipping or the numbers unravelling.
In practice that comes down to three things.
Planning approval that lands first time wherever it can. JSA's approval rate sits at 97% since 2020. To a developer, that's not a trophy on a shelf. It's holding costs you do not carry and a sales date that doesn't slide to the right.
A design that survives contact with a builder. Drawings that price close to plan. Details that don't spawn a fortnight of queries on site. The space between a scheme that looks good in a render and one that builds to budget is where developer margin leaks away.
Someone who picks up the phone when the programme hits a snag. It will. The only question is whether your architect is still in the room when it does. With JSA, the people you appoint are the people you keep, through to site.
Put together, that is what a developer's fee pays for. Not drawings. Fewer expensive surprises, a programme that holds, and a finished scheme that sells or lets at the number you underwrote. On most projects the fee covers itself in the mistakes that never happen.
First scheme or fortieth, the discipline holds
A developer on their first site needs something different from one on their fortieth, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
On a first scheme, the value is making the process legible. What the planning risk is. Where the money goes, and when. Which decisions you can change your mind about later and which you cannot. You shouldn't need a translator to follow your own project.
For an established operator, the value is pace. An architect who reads a site appraisal the way you do, flags the planning constraint before it costs you, and doesn't need the commercial logic spelled out twice.
Boxton Homes sits firmly in the experienced camp. A good number of JSA's developer clients are on their first project. Both get the same answer to the same question. The discipline doesn't bend to your track record. The amount of explaining does.
How the work runs
There's no mystery to it. Three stages, in plain order:
- Start with the site and the numbers, not the drawings. Feasibility, planning risk, and what the land can realistically carry before anyone picks up a pen.
- Design to the budget and the brief, then take it through planning with the local authority. You see the risks before you commit, not after the money is spent.
- Stay on through technical design and onto site. The people who won your approval are the people answering the builder's questions, so nothing gets lost in the handover.
Specialist housing and co-living: The range JSA works across now
The developer work has widened well beyond standard residential. A quick map of where it sits today:
- Multi-unit residential and house building. From a row of homes to a full site, designed to sell or to hold.
- HMOs and co-living. Higher-density models where the room ratios decide whether the scheme works.
- Supported and specialist housing. Accessibility, care and funding conditions built into the plan, not bolted on.
- Class Q and agricultural conversions. A long-standing JSA specialism, turning redundant farm buildings into homes.
- Single high-specification homes for developers. One-off builds for sale, where the finish has to justify the price.
Mainstream residential is well-charted ground. The briefs getting more interesting are the ones with a model sitting behind them.
Co-living has to balance private space against shared space so the numbers work and the result still feels like somewhere a person would choose to live. Get that ratio wrong and you have either a scheme that does not stack up or one nobody wants to rent.
Specialist and supported housing adds another layer. Accessibility standards, care requirements, funding conditions, and an end user whose needs belong at the centre of the plan rather than the edge of it. These are not standard layouts with the label swapped. They ask the design to understand the operating model, not decorate it.
More of JSA's recent developer work sits in this territory. It's harder. It's also where understanding the brief earns its place.
- The developers moving into these models are not all specialists either. Some are mainstream house builders looking for a use that works on a site the open market will not, or an operator partner who needs a building that fits their model exactly. Either way, the design has to start from how the place will be run, not how it will photograph.
The planning piece, because it is usually the piece that hurts
For most developers, planning is where the programme lives or dies. A refusal is not a small setback. It is a resubmission, a delay measured in months, and a hole in the cashflow you modelled.
Twenty years across Midlands authorities buys something specific: knowing which arguments land with which officers, what a particular council will wear on a particular site, and where the genuine red lines sit against the points that are open to negotiation. Erewash, Amber Valley, Broxtowe, South Derbyshire, Lichfield, Birmingham. They don't all read policy the same way, and a developer pays for the difference.
That local read is most of why the 97% figure holds. Not optimism. Pattern recognition built over 700-plus projects.
It also shapes the strategy before a single drawing is submitted. Knowing when to go in with a pre-application enquiry, when a design tweak removes an officer's objection before it is written down, and when a scheme is better split or phased to clear policy. A developer rarely sees that work directly. They see the approval, and the months they didn't lose.
Why developers come back
JSA has worked with more than 500 clients since 2002, and a fair share of the developer work now comes from people who have been through the process once and chose to do it again.
That tells you more than any single project can. A repeat developer client is not buying the building twice. They are buying the absence of the problems they had elsewhere. No ego on the brief. No silence after the appointment. No surprise on the fee. You stay in control of your scheme. JSA's job is to get it approved, get it built, and stay out of the way of your return.
A good amount of new developer work now arrives by recommendation, one developer mentioning JSA to another over a site they are both circling. That is the quiet measure of whether the last project went well. It is also why the practice has never needed to lead with the hard sell.
The fee question, answered straight
Developers ask about fees earlier than homeowners do. JSA prices on the complexity of the work, not a percentage that climbs every time the build cost moves. You get a figure you can drop into your appraisal and hold to. No creep. No surprise invoice when the scheme grows a storey.
Spend less and you tend to pay for it later, in a refusal, a value-engineering scramble, or a building that costs more to put up than it needed to. The fee is a line in the appraisal that protects every other line.
Developing in the Midlands?
First site or fortieth. A terrace of houses, a co-living block, a supported-housing scheme, or a single high-specification home. The questions don't change. Will it get approved. Will it build to budget. Will it deliver. If those are the ones on your mind, they are the ones JSA is set up to answer.
Got a site, with or without planning? Whether it is your first scheme or your fortieth, let's work out whether it stacks up before you commit.
Areas We Cover
JSA Architects Across the Midlands
JSA works with developers right across the Midlands. Studios in Derby, Nottingham, Lichfield and Solihull, with developer schemes spanning Erewash, Amber Valley, Broxtowe, South Derbyshire, Derby, Nottingham, Lichfield, Birmingham and Solihull.
Architects in Derby · Architects in Nottingham · Architects in Lichfield · Architects in Solihull · Architects in Sutton Coldfield
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How it works (Because "get in touch" shouldn't feel like a leap of faith)
01. Talk One conversation to understand your project, your budget, and whether we're the right fit. No obligation. No sales pitch.
02. Design Everything built around your brief. We sketch, develop, and refine — with check-ins before anything is fixed. You stay in control without getting buried in the detail.
03. Deliver Through planning, building regs, and into construction. We handle the process. You make the decisions that matter.
