A browser-based rebuild of its development appraisal software
The same calculations UK housing providers have relied on since 1998, now built around the board that wants three scenarios on one paper and the auditor who wants the file two years later.
CRANLEIGH, England, 25 September, 2026
SDS has opened Proval Vantage for onboarding. Vantage is a rebuild of the development appraisal software used by more than 250 housing associations, local authorities and developers across UK housing to decide whether a new build scheme can go ahead. The calculation engine is unchanged. Everything around it has been rebuilt for a market in which boards approve less readily, funding assumptions move mid-programme and every appraisal has to hold up under audit years later.
Customers have seen Vantage at launch events in Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and London this month. Existing customers can request migration from today, with wider release to follow.
What SDS is seeing across its customer base
Boards are asking harder questions. A volatile economic picture has made development committees slower to approve and more demanding about what sits behind a figure. Schemes that would once have cleared on a single appraisal now come back two or three times first.
Underneath those decisions, grant assumptions shift, build costs shift, and rent settlements change what a scheme can carry, so the same site goes back through the model again. Tenure mix, home types and payment profiles are agreed earlier in the process and then revisited more often.
Every one of those versions has to hold up months later. Grant-funded schemes are audited, and when one is sampled the provider has to produce the file and show how each figure was reached, often long after the officer who ran the appraisal has moved on.
"Development and finance teams are trusted with some of the highest-stakes numbers in housing, on tools that were never designed around them," said Hye-Joo Kim, Chief Operating Officer at SDS. "Vantage is our first step in changing that. We kept the calculations nearly three decades of housing providers already trust, and rebuilt everything around the person doing the work."
ProVal has been in use across UK social housing since 1998 and is the most widely used development appraisal tool in the sector.
What's new
ProVal started as a spreadsheet, became a database application, and has now been rewritten to run in a browser. The calculations are the only thing to come through all three unchanged.
An appraisal opens on any machine with a browser, on site, in a partner's office or at home, and everyone works on the same version against the same assumptions. Nobody is circulating a file called "Site A final v7 revised" and hoping it is the one the committee saw last week.
Scenarios run side by side rather than one at a time. A scheme can be tested against several grant, cost and rent positions in a single sitting and the results compared directly, so a committee sees one paper rather than three returns.
Whole programmes consolidate without exporting between spreadsheets, and each version of an appraisal is kept alongside the assumptions it was run on. That is the record the auditor asks for two years later.
Vantage is the first product built on Nova Suite, SDS's new platform. Future SDS products will be built on the same foundation, so they work together rather than as separate systems.
More information here
About SDS
SDS is a UK software provider to the affordable housing sector, founded in 1994 and based in Cranleigh, Surrey. Its products include the ProVal appraisal model, the LandVal residual land appraisal model, Keynect for sales professionals and Sequel for programme management.
Media contact: Aina Martinez, Marketing Manager, marketing@s-d-s.co.uk
