Plots for sale in Elviria

This is the whole of the purchase and it is the part people establish last. On a plot, the planning file is the asset; the land is only where it sits.

The three numbers that matter

Permitted built area as a proportion of the plot, maximum height or storeys, and the setbacks from each boundary. Those three decide the size and shape of the house you can put there, and they vary by zone within this district rather than applying across it. Two plots of the same size on the same road can permit very different houses.

Why they differ from one street to the next

The shelf was zoned in pieces as it was developed, so the rules follow the wave of building a parcel belonged to rather than any district boundary. A road laid out in the nineteen-seventies and one laid out twenty years later can sit a few hundred metres apart and allow quite different houses on the same area of ground.

What already has permission

A handful of the plots for sale in Elviria carry planning permission already and a further group is being offered off plan with a design attached. Those sit at a premium over bare land, and what the premium buys is a drawing somebody has already fitted to that particular slope. A design made for one piece of ground rarely transfers to another, which is why a plot with a scheme attached is really two things being sold together. See plots on the whole coast.

On bare land the aspect is a decision rather than a given, and it is the one advantage a plot has over every finished house on the market.

South and south-east dominate, and that is the shelf

Almost all of these sites record a southerly or south-easterly orientation, which follows from the land: a slope facing the sea faces south by definition. A south-east plot gets the sun from early morning, loses it earlier in the afternoon and is noticeably more comfortable in July than a due-west one — which on this coast is a genuine advantage that finished houses rarely let you choose.

You get to put the house where you want it

This is the real argument for building rather than buying. Within the setbacks you decide where the terrace goes, which rooms get the morning, where the pool sits relative to the shade, and which direction the kitchen window faces. Every one of those is fixed forever in a finished house and most of them were fixed by somebody who was not thinking about you.

And the one thing the slope will not let you choose

Where the shade falls in winter. A parcel on rising ground gives the low sun back to the hill at its own back, and the higher that hill, the earlier in the afternoon it goes. Go and stand on the plots for sale in Elviria that interest you in the winter months, at the hour you care about, before you decide which one to buy. It is free, it takes twenty minutes, and nobody does it.

Three things about the land itself, and all three are readable on a walk across it.

Slope, and how much of it there is

A gentle parcel and a steep one of the same area are different pieces of land rather than two versions of the same one. On the lower shelf the fall across a site is slight; by the time the ground reaches the pines it can drop a full storey across the width of a garden, and that fall decides where a house can sit and how much of the plot ends up as wall rather than lawn.

Pine, scrub and whatever is already growing

Most of these parcels still carry the vegetation the shelf had before anybody divided it: umbrella pine, mastic, rosemary and the low scrub between them. A mature pine is an asset on a site this size rather than an obstacle, because no new garden can buy thirty years of shade, and the sensible placing of a house here starts from the trees that are staying.

And the way the rain leaves

This coast takes its year of water in a handful of weeks, and on a slope it all arrives at once. Where a parcel stands in relation to the dry watercourses that cross the shelf is worth reading on the ground, and it reads easily: the gravel has collected where the water goes and the earth is bare where it runs. What eventually stands on ground like this is on detached villas in Elviria.

Nearly every one of these parcels has built neighbours on at least two sides, and that changes what buying land here actually is.

Built neighbours are information

Walk a road of finished houses and the zone tells you itself what it permitted: how high the houses went, how far back from the lane they sit, where the garages were put and how the gardens were drained. On an isolated parcel all of that is guesswork until somebody has been paid to work it out. Here it stands in front of you in brick.

The mains are in the lane because the neighbours needed them

A district that was built out had to be serviced in order to build, so water, power and drainage run in the made-up roads of these urbanisations rather than stopping somewhere behind them. A parcel inside a completed urbanisation is serviced ground with a gap in it, which is a different sort of land from a field with a fence round it.

Roads, lighting and trees older than the house will be

Kerbed lanes, street lighting and planting that has had decades to fill in: the setting arrives complete and the building is the only new thing in it. That is the reverse of a new urbanisation, where the house is finished first and the surroundings take another ten years to look like anything at all.

And the street will not change around you

Because there is nothing left on it to build. A parcel inside a completed district has no second phase behind it, no site access running past the gate for three years and no hoarding standing where the view is. A finished street is the one thing a new scheme cannot sell you. Our property alarm watches a market where the good land goes quietly, our agents in Estepona cover east Marbella, and the rest of the district is on property for sale in Elviria and houses in Elviria.