78664Development Management Platform - A SaaS Enabled Marketplace for the Construction SectorClosedSmall Business Research InitiativeInnovate UK\*\*Development Management Platform - A SaaS Enabled Marketplace for the Construction Sector\*\* The UK faces an unprecedented housing shortage; 3.9 million new homes must be built just to meet current demand. Despite this, just half the 340,000 homes needed each year are being built and the shortfall continues to increase. This was the situation in the construction sector before COVID and what we have learnt in the past few months is that adequate housing is an integral part of the fight against COVID. It has been proven that overcrowded and intergenerational housing drastically increases the risks of catching the COVID virus. This has disproportionately affected the BAME community in the UK, as well as those affected by the housing crisis. The UK has enough under-utilised, brownfield land to deliver over 1 million homes so why are we not building the homes we need? There are several reasons for this. Here are a few of the issues that our project will help overcome: 1. The large private sector housebuilders that now dominate the market are mainly interested in the large lucrative sites and are not focused on the smaller brownfield sites. 2. Construction SME's have reduced by 80% in the last 30 years resulting in less competition and less construction capacity for the smaller brownfield sites. 3. Large public sector landowners own a lot of land but they have limited Development Management capacity so they only focus their limited resources on the largest sites. 4. The nascent offsite construction industry is growing but these new providers need access to large pipelines of sites to keep growing. This project consists of R&D to validate the use of a SaaS enabled Marketplace in the UK construction sector. The aspiration is for the Development Management Platform to provide automated Development Management solutions through software (SaaS) and then procure works to our specialist vetted suppliers via an online marketplace. The solution will allow public sector landowners to instantly boost their in-house development capacity via tech whilst unlocking opportunities for SME's and the offsite construction industry at scale. Our aspiration is to allow any public sector landowner to directly develop their land for housing at a click of a button. Our consortium includes RenKap, a government backed PropTech start-up, Ecologic Homes Consultancy, a leading offsite construction consultancy and Advice Cloud, an industry expert in enabling tech companies to overcome public procurement hurdles.