Tender

Woven Housing tenders land and build contract in West Belfast

By Staff Writer  |  22 August 2026

Woven Housing Association Ltd has published a tender notice for a competitive land, design and build contract in West Belfast, County Antrim, for between 100 and 150 social housing units. The estimated value is recorded as 35,000,000 pounds excluding value added tax. The notice was published on 21 August 2026 and follows a planning notice published six minutes earlier on the same reference.

The association states that it is seeking to appoint developers to provide land for the development of social housing, and that it seeks land in West Belfast. The requirement is expressed as a range: the association will not consider sites providing fewer than 100 units or more than 150 units. It states that units are preferably to be delivered on a single site, but that adjacent sites may be considered, and it gives the reason as the provision of an efficient housing management service.

The obligation on the successful party is set out in one sentence and it is wider than a build contract. Economic operators must provide the land, design, construct and ensure completion of the scheme for the association, in accordance with the Department for Communities Housing Association Guide, the association's own requirements and statutory body requirements. The procurement is recorded as a competitive flexible procedure and the main category is works. The site is recorded as falling within the Northern Ireland Housing Executive area.

The notice records a gross figure of 42,000,000 pounds alongside the estimated value of 35,000,000 pounds, which is consistent with the addition of value added tax at the standard rate. No closing date for expressions of interest is carried in the release read for this item.

What the practitioner should take from this

The first point is that this is not a building contract dressed up as one. It is a land acquisition, a design commission and a construction contract bundled into a single competitive process, and the bidder carries all three. The commercial consequence is that site risk moves to the developer before the developer is appointed. A bidder is being asked to control land, satisfy itself on title, access, ground conditions and planning prospects, and price the build, all against a unit range set by somebody else. The party that wins is the party that has already solved the land problem, which narrows the field considerably.

The second point is the unit range, and it is a harder constraint than it looks. A floor of 100 units and a ceiling of 150 rules out both the small infill site and the large strategic site. It also creates a design problem where a site will comfortably take 90 or 170. On a scheme of this kind the density assumption drives the planning application, and the planning application drives the programme. A bidder should establish early whether the range is a hard requirement or an indicative one, because the answer changes what land is worth looking at.

The third point is the reference to the Department for Communities Housing Association Guide and to statutory body requirements. Those are compliance standards imported by reference into the contract. Imported standards are where cost sits and where disputes start, because they are rarely priced with the same care as the drawings. Where a standard is updated between tender and completion, the question of which version governs should be settled in the contract rather than argued about afterwards.

The fourth point is the phrase ensure completion. It is a short phrase carrying an unusually broad obligation. On an ordinary design and build contract the contractor undertakes to carry out and complete the works. Undertaking to ensure completion of a scheme, where the same party also supplies the land and the design, sits closer to a development agreement than to a construction contract, and development agreements typically carry longstop dates, step in rights and buy back provisions that a construction contract does not. Which document the parties end up signing matters more here than the label on the notice.

The fifth point is one of procedure. A competitive flexible procedure gives the contracting authority room to shape the stages, the dialogue and the evaluation. That flexibility cuts both ways. It allows a sensible process on a complex requirement, and it also means the rules of the competition are set out in the tender documents rather than prescribed, so a bidder cannot assume the familiar structure of an open or restricted procedure. Read the process document before the specification.

No site, no closing date, no number of lots and no evaluation weighting is published in the release read for this item, and none is stated here.