Yes I have. It all depends on the attitude of your local Council. I converted a larger property on a room by room basis and I started with part-time.hours. I didn’t complete the project and converted it back into a house because I didn’t get enough business to make it worth while. My local Council were very relaxed and I didn’t need planning consent straight away as I wasn’t using the property full time for business use. I had a chance to try out the practicality of the venture.
For a smaller property I’d say it was potentially ideal. The issues are whether parking will create issues for local residents and whether there will be concerns about whether you are running a brothel. It’s about the risk of changing the character of the area to the detriment of your neighbours. So if there are no other converted premises in the area and no business use properties nearby the Council may be resistant - best way to deal with this is to get your neighbours onside. I told my neighbours of my plans and asked them to let me know if they had any worries. Obviously cars driving around slowly, passing and re passing your house is a bit annoying, but we didn’t have too much of that problem. I did cringe when I saw my clients routinely drive the wrong way down a one way street looking for parking.
Ultimately I didn’t find it successful, my customers preferred coming into town rather than coming to a residential area, but I’m glad I tried.
Id suggest that you’d be best off keeping your property as a potential home initially, so keep a single bed in the house and stick cushions on it to make it Into a sofa, and have a kitchen with crockery, pans, tea towels etc. that way you might not have to get the property re-valued for business rates straight away. In general, commercial properties are worth a lot less than residential properties. You don’t want to risk losing the residential status of the property without careful thought as you can earn more renting out a one room home than the same space for commercial purposes and you need to consider the market value of your property and that of your neighbours.
You also need to think about security. I live near the house I set up as a salon and I’ve never had a break in at home, but my “salon” got broken into twice in 18 months. Having a property that might have cash on the premises is theft attractive.- residential streets are much quieter and there’s no street CCTV deterring dodgy characters. No-one saw anything, and there were several neighbours including my very nosy, elderly next door neighbour, that must have been home at the time. I felt anxious that I’d brought criminals into the area. If I’d been my neighbours Id have felt very upset and anxious.
Other issues, you can’t use your windows for display purposes as you can in a commercial business street, nor can you stick lights or signs on the front of your property nor stick pavement posters out in the street. But there are ways round this. if you look at homes with a one room salon, they have discreet signage that works very well. You just can’t have the sort of conversion that could then be used by another business in the future that might cause more problems for neighbours.
You might want to discuss this with a commercial surveyor. They will know the attitude of the Council and it saves you alerting the Council to your plans before you’ve had a chance to think them through properly. A small investment that might save you money and hassles in the future.
Good luck and let us know how you get on.
