Some of the most useful space in the North of England works six months of the year. Let’s put it to work for twelve.
You never pay us anything. Our share comes out of what a site earns, which is money it does not earn today.
Where do you fit?
I’ve got space that could earn
A barn, yard, workshop, unit or bit of land that only earns for part of the year.
I need space for my business
Storage, a secure yard, a workshop, near you, without the endless searching.
I run a space business and want sites
Storage, parking, dog fields, glamping, a pipeline of vetted sites to expand into.
Northumberland, pilot region
Estavelle works out what a site could earn in the months it is doing nothing, then brings in the business that runs it. Not a stranger off a listings site: an operator we have vetted, working to our standards and inside the rules you set. What is allowed on your land, what is not, and when. Income from a yard or a building does not depend on the weather or on what wheat is making, which is most of the point. We appraise sites across the North of England. The first sites we activate are in Northumberland, Tyne and Wear and County Durham.
Every farm has years it would rather forget. Wet ground, a bad price, a scheme that closed. A yard or a building does not care what the weather did. Eight thousand from a let and eight thousand more crop are the same figure on paper and not the same thing at all, because one of them still arrives in a bad year.
72%
Defra Farm Business Survey, 2024/25
The owners who haven’t started aren’t short of ideas. They’re short of an answer about their building, their access, whether the neighbours would object, and nobody wants to spend thousands finding out. The ones who have started tend to say the same thing about it: the useful part is not the size of the cheque, it is that the cheque arrives in the years when nothing else does.
Open storage rents rose 24 per cent in a single year (Knight Frank 2024), and the UK has seven times less storage per person than the US (Savills 2025). Letting buildings for non agricultural use is now the most common form of diversification in England, at half of all farm businesses (Defra Farm Business Survey 2024/25).
One free record.
Three honest answers.
The Asset Passport captures your site and, the part nobody else writes down, what you’d actually allow. Vans but not dogs. Weekdays but not weekends.
You get back up to three realistic routes to income, ranked, with the effort, the obstacles and who pays for what. If the honest answer is ‘do nothing’, we say so.
It costs nothing because we only earn when a site earns. Working out whether yours can is our cost, not yours. It is a commercial opinion, not planning or legal advice.
How we are paid
You never write us a cheque. Not for the Passport, not for the appraisal work behind it, and not to get started. Estavelle earns a share of what a site actually takes once something is running, and an introduction fee where a route leads to a third party such as a solar or battery developer. That is the whole model.
The share is of what a site takes, not of what it profits. Profit can be argued about through how costs are counted. Takings cannot, which is why we chose the one you can check.
Take any of this to your own solicitor, land agent or accountant before you act on it. There is a summary written for them here.
Asset Passport
Site
Illustrative holding
Northumberland · approx. 6 acres
Dog field
Green
Enclosed acreage with quiet boundaries suits secure off lead exercise
Driver: Local dog owner density and drive time catchment
£4,000 to £7,500 / yr
Dry storage
Amber
Hardstanding and vehicle access suit dry goods or container storage
Driver: Nearby open storage rates and yard access
£9,000 to £16,000 / yr
Camping and events
Red
The outlook and pitch potential are there, but demand needs proving first
Driver: Proven seasonal demand and access constraints
£3,000 to £11,000 / yr
Note: Indicative only, desktop only, no site visit, based on owner supplied information. Not a valuation or advice, and not to be relied on for financial, tax, lending or legal decisions. Routes compete for the same ground and cannot all run at once, so they are not additive.
You know the ones.
A single large figure. No downside mentioned. A map with your field circled, and a request for a signature before anyone has visited. The Country Land and Business Association and the NFU have both warned about this pattern for years, and most landowners near a substation have a drawer full of it.
The difference, line by line
What they do
One headline number, no range
What we do
Ranges, with the reason for the range named
What they do
Nothing about what could go wrong
What we do
A Red answer when a route does not work
What they do
A signature wanted quickly
What we do
Nothing to commit to, and nothing to sign to get an appraisal
What they do
Fees for a speculative application
What we do
No fee for the appraisal, ever
What they do
No named person behind it
What we do
One named person, and how he gets paid
Depending on the route you may need an accountant, a solicitor or an insurer, and we will tell you which and when rather than leaving you to find out. We would still rather you asked your own adviser than took our word for it, and that goes for us as much as for anyone else who writes to you.
Your space doesn’t need to be tidy.
Most of the space worth activating is not a pristine commercial park. It’s a half empty yard, a corner of a paddock, a barn with one good end and one bad one. Rough ground, partial availability and seasonal use are normal, not disqualifying.
If a site needs work, that does not automatically mean you pay for it. Setup capital can sit with you, with an operator, or with a category team, and the revenue split moves to match. Which route makes sense depends on the site and on how involved you want to be. In most cases the point of testing demand first is precisely so that nobody spends anything until there is a paying customer waiting.
And if a site genuinely isn’t viable for anything we run, we tell you that up front. That answer is free too.
And this is not a lease. Nothing here ties your land up for years or hands anyone a right to be there. It runs in the months you are not using the space, it scales up or down, and it stops when you need it back.
Red is a real answer.
Red
Some sites are not worth activating. The access is wrong, the demand is not there, or the numbers do not clear the cost of getting started. A Red is a judgement about a site’s access, demand and cost today. It is not a judgement about the worth of your land or about you. The Passport names what is holding it back, so you know exactly what would have to be different.
That answer is free too, and it arrives as considered as any other. Keep it. If the road changes, or a grid connection appears, or the demand around you moves, come back and we will look again at no charge. A business that cannot tell you no is not assessing anything.
You’re dealing with me.
I’m Jamie Pratt. My degree is in building surveying, a first, but I went straight into development management rather than practising. Masterplanning towns and estates, working out what a place could become and what it would take to get there. More recently I’ve done the same on major defence programmes.
I should be straight about the main thing. Estavelle is new. I have spent my career assessing land and buildings, hundreds of housing sites and operational aerodromes among them, working out what could be done with them and what it would take. What I have not done before is run this, under my own name, as a business. That means you get more of my attention than you would from someone with a hundred sites, and it means you cannot ring three neighbours and ask how it went. If that is a problem it is a fair one, and it is why the appraisal costs you nothing.
There is a second thing I want from the early sites and it is not the fee. I want to know what actually happens once something is running. What the operator got wrong. Where the money landed against what we said it would. What you would not do again. I would rather hear that early and change it than find out two years on, when you have had enough of it. If you tell me something is not working, I will come and look at it.
Estavelle is that expertise turned toward smaller places. The family farms and smallholders who get the least help and could use it the most. In these early days, when you deal with Estavelle, you’re mostly dealing with me.
I don’t get paid for a report. I don’t get paid to hand you homework. I only earn when you earn.
Jamie Pratt
Founder, Estavelle
Four steps.
No spend before proof.
- 01
Passport
Tell us about the site, once.
- 02
Routes
Up to three ways it could earn, ranked honestly.
- 03
Proof
We find paying customers before you spend anything.
- 04
Income
Money comes in monthly, whatever the weather did.
Why not just do it yourself
You can. Plenty of people do, and if you already have a tenant lined up you do not need us. What you would be taking on is finding the customers, pricing it, chasing payment, and carrying the risk that the use you picked was the wrong one. What we bring is knowing which use pays in your area, an operator who already runs that kind of site, and the bookings and money handled. If none of that is worth a share of the takings to you, do it yourself and we will still tell you what we think it is worth, for nothing.
A neighbour doing the same thing helps you.
Businesses looking for space do not look for one site. They look for an area where sites exist, because if the first one is full the second one will do. Three yards in a valley get more enquiries each than one yard on its own.
That is not a nice idea, it is how the model is built. One operator running several sites nearby shares the marketing, the customers and the overflow between them. Your neighbour taking this up does not divide the market with you. It thickens it for both of you.
NORTHUMBERLAND YARD
The competitor we have to beat is doing nothing at all.
Doing nothing feels safe. It is also the only option guaranteed to earn you nothing.