Could the overgrown plot that Ray and Maya Kerr found on Google Maps be the right self build site for their dream home? Mike Dade takes a closer look

PLOT WATCH: Mike Dade investigates

WHO Ray & Maya Kerr

WHAT A patch of overgrown land positioned high up from the adjacent road on a retaining wall

WHERE East Sussex

Ray and Maya Kerr are keen to construct their own home and have spent a good deal of time poring over magazines, attending self build shows and looking at catalogues.

They love the idea of designing an energyefficient house that suits their particular lifestyle and tastes. They want to live in their hometown to be close to friends and family, but in the last twelve months not a single building plot has come onto the market. They’re now searching for suitable looking bits of land with the view to seeing whether an owner would be willing to sell.

They have found a conveniently central overgrown site that doesn’t seem to serve any particular purpose. Could this become a viable building plot? How can they find out and go about trying to buy it?

Ray and Maya found this patch by looking for empty spaces on Google maps. While searching, they quickly discovered that many promising-looking sites – particularly on housing estates – actually serve some amenity purpose and were probably designated as such as part of a landscaping scheme when the estate was laid out. But this plot is different; it’s tucked behind high street shops, with a frontage to a side road.