A detached new-build home Laura developed — white render, slate roof and landscaped frontage

About us

We’re developers,
helping developers.

In a world of rising costs and shrinking margins, the detail in the numbers has never been more critical.

Laura Sykes, Founder & CEO of BankBuild
Laura Sykes Founder & CEO, BankBuild Ex-Tesco merchandise planner and Head of Growth at Sparesbox. Now a property developer.

Laura’s background

Never underestimate the power of 1% at scale.

Tesco · merchandise planner

Running a £50m department tracked line by line, entirely in Excel. At that scale, 1% is £500,000 — and finding it, or losing it, came down to the small numbers hidden in stock, availability and promotions.

Sparesbox · Head of Growth · Sydney, Australia

She took that discipline from launch to exit — the same instinct, applied to a startup where nothing could be wasted.

Her own £1.2m build

Then she put her own money where the spreadsheet was. On your own build, 1% isn’t a line on someone else’s dashboard. It’s twelve grand of your margin.

And most developers aren’t losing 1%. They’re losing far more.

The honest ledger

We counted exactly where ours went.

That 1% lesson got expensive on our own build. This is the post-mortem most developers run in their head at 2am — except backed by the real site records.

The build, start to finish

01
The original bungalow before demolition
Where it startedThe original bungalow.

The site

A tight plot with overhead cables meant no crane and every delivery by hand — and with soil tests late, procurement stalled before a spade had even hit the ground.

02
Piling rig boring through heavy clay
Piling the clayEvery pile fought for.
Foundation trenches and footings being set out
FoundationsFootings, after the weather.

The ground

Heavy clay and a high water table fought every pile — then a month’s rain collapsed the open trenches, and re-sequencing the whole programme by hand hurt more than the re-dig.

03
Timber frame superstructure going up at sunrise
Frame upFourteen trades behind it.
Underfloor heating pipes and liquid screed pour
Fit-outServices in, floor down.

Frame & fit-out

Fourteen trades stacked into the same rooms, changes flying around unmanaged — and every idle day, the finance kept carrying interest for nothing.

04
External render being applied from scaffolding
Closing inRender on, watertight.
Render finished and the driveway going in down the side of the house
The externalsRender done, driveway going in.

Finishing

Render on, the driveway going in — the build all but done. But by now the paperwork had fallen behind the bricks.

05
The finished house
The resultFinished — and worth it.

The result

It finished beautifully, but paperwork backlogs held up sign-off — so we missed the peak selling window entirely.

The first part is development — you can’t take the weather off the board. The second part is admin — and that, you can.

Build vs buy

Building it yourself feels like the safe, efficient choice. It’s neither.

Owning the code feels like control. In practice it’s a permanent cost and a single point of failure — and it pulls your best people off building.

On your own

With BankBuild

It breaks every time a tool or a lender changes.

Updates are handled for you, automatically.

A bill that never stops — engineers, retainers, fixes.

One platform, one shared cost.

One system, one team: a single point of failure.

One hardened core, watched 24/7 and kept in the UK.

Developers and lenders

Whatever the stage. Whatever the size.

We run the admin layer for everyone in a development, from a first project to a full pipeline, with no need to change how you already work.

Work with us