A travelling ministry leader who claims to be the incarnation of Jesus Christ has confirmed he purchased a residential property in north Birmingham, Alabama, to house himself and a group of followers — a story that has understandably generated headlines for its novelty value. But strip away the theological claims and what remains is a familiar and increasingly relevant property story: an unregulated group acquiring residential housing stock for communal, quasi-institutional use, with local authorities and neighbours left scrambling to establish whether planning rules even apply. For UK property professionals, the Alabama case is a useful, if unusual, prompt to examine how our own planning and housing regulation framework would — or would not — cope with an identical scenario landing in Birmingham, England, or any other major UK city.