Originally Posted by
Asturias56
None of those items is anywhere near a deal breaker to a developer who gets all that lovely flat land (with drainage!)
People will buy houses anywhere (look at the A4 Cromwell Road in London ) - especially if the price is right
But my bet is phased development - non-airline to start with (which cuts an awful lot of costs with some business park/housing and then a gradual withering away over 5-10 years to wholesale built up
It's only 'lovely flat land (with drainage)' if someone (e.g. a new owner) spends money to remediate it so that it becomes 'lovely flat land'. Your second sentence backs-up a point I made in my earlier post - the nature of the area may mean that houses built on it are less valuable than houses built somewhere more attractive (ie not surrounded by a dual-carriageway, fuel farm and live runway and taxiway). There isn't a huge untapped demand for housing in South Ayrshire - since around 2007 the Local Plan has allocated land at South East Ayr for >500 houses - that's all farmland and is relatively easy to develop (certainly compared to remediating part of the current airport site) but despite two consented planning applications, no developer has started work.
Similarly, where is the demand for a business park going to come from? Scottish Enterprise prepared a site immediately to the north of the runway at Monkton (
https://goo.gl/maps/TmsfA3n1H5z4aF2A8) at the turn of the century to create the Prestwick Aerospace Park. The plots there are levelled and serviced with roads and utilities - all a potential occupier has to do is construct a building on one of the plots, but still plenty of it remains undeveloped. Who's going to spend money remediating part of the current airport site for a business park when there is demonstrably little demand even for a ready-made site nearby?