Is it cheaper to build or buy a house in the UK?

In London it is almost always cheaper to buy a house than to build one, and the reason is land. A plot with planning permission on a decent South London street costs so much that by the time you have built on it, you have usually spent more than the finished house next door. The house is not the expensive part. The dirt under it is.

Self-build wins in a different setting: cheap plots outside the cities, where land is a modest slice of the total and you control spec and phasing. Rural Wales, parts of the North, the edges of market towns. Buy land cheaply, manage the project with discipline, and building can beat buying comfortably.

There is a third option most people never price, and it is the one we build every week: buy the dated house nobody else wants and renovate it. Ex-rental flats, unmodernised Victorian terraces, 1930s houses with original everything. They sell at a discount, and a whole-house renovation from £1,200 per square metre, or a kitchen extension from £2,500 per square metre, usually costs less than the gap between the dated house and the done one. That is the work All Well does across South East and South West London, from Crystal Palace to Clapham, and it is how most of our clients ended up with the house they actually wanted.