The Housebuilder’s Bible explains everything you need to know about managing a build, be it a new build from scratch or refurbishment/renovation of an existing property. It’s written by a builder using simple easy-to-understand every day language and doesn’t assume any previous property development experience.

I found the book particularly useful to understand how a house actually hangs together, which is vitally important when selecting projects, calculating costs (there are lots of useful pricing tables) and complexity.

The Reality of Building and Developing

The author, Mark Brinkley, often injects his own sense of humour into his writing. One the one hand, he covers how things should work within the building industry (e.g. planning permission, site management and working with tradesmen) and then goes onto to explain how it actually works in reality.

It’s a very thorough read (over 400 pages), but each chapters can be read individually, so you can dip in and out of sections as and when you need specific knowledge.

If you are considering dipping your toe into property development, then I highly recommend that you read this book — it helped me get over my fear of not knowing what I was talking about in front of builders and tradesmen! Even if you’re a seasoned developer, I’m certain you’ll gain enough golden nuggets of information from this book to make it worth the small outlay.