Team Steenvlinder visiting the team of Custom Build Homes in Edinburgh, January 2023
Steenvlinder invests to scale up
20 February 2023
We are pleased to announce our recent 20% investment into Custom Build Homes (CBH), a UK-based Enabler of custom and self-build housing. Our strategic investment will enable us to collaborate more effectively with CBH and accelerate the scaling of custom and self-build in the UK.
Hans Sparreboom, CEO of Steenvlinder UK, said, “While the ambition to grow the number of homes is important, the social ambition to make custom and self-building more accessible will diversify the UK’s housing market with the development of better designed homes for happier homeowners.”
We have experience in scaling up self-build in The Netherlands and have now entered the UK market. Self-build creates proud ownership, vibrant communities and is an attractive opportunity for UK towns and cities. We need to revolutionise the marketplace. We see the same drive and energy in CBH and we look forward to seeing what we can achieve together.
“Our experience, model and openness towards self-building in The Netherlands will complement CBH’ knowledge and pragmatism towards navigating the UK market together, and most certainly create more opportunities to build!”, adds Hans.
Self-build and Custom Build
Steenvlinder focuses primarily on developing serviced plots for self-builders to directly build their own homes, while CBH is focused towards customisation of homes to drive scale and give choice in the internal layout of the home.
Together with CBH we can support local authorities to meet their legal duty to provide planning permissions for custom and self-build plots under the Self-Build & Custom Housebuilding Act 2015, including allocated sites through Local Plans and S106.
We are especially impressed by the “Right to Build Register”, the UK’s national consumer demand database that the CBH team developed incubated within BuildStore Ltd. (CBH former parent company)
CBH has taken ownership of the technology, on which several local planning authorities track demand for custom and self-build housing in their areas, and where millions of data points from over 100,000 applications are used to inform planning, design and development decisions to create new places and products that respond to the needs of real people.
We’re excited to be part of CBH and look forward to growing together.
Tom Connor, Founder and CEO at CBH:
“We are pleased and excited to have such an experienced, forward-thinking and socially driven developer like Steenvlinder as a shareholder and board member. Their continental approach to development and placemaking through CSB has enabled them to grow quickly in The Netherlands, and their openness to share and coach means we are sure to find plenty of opportunities to collaborate in the UK going forward.”
"While the ambition to grow the number of homes is important, the social ambition to make custom and self-building more accessible will diversify the UK’s housing market with the development of better designed homes for happier homeowners."