Strategic Land

Overview

FSP’s Strategic Land team have experience “on both sides of the table” which means that we are well placed to advise both landowners and developer-promoters on these complicated but potentially very valuable agreements. We are often recommended into transactions where long-standing family solicitors are struggling with the different concepts, formulas and risk allocations that apply in these arrangements. Turning natural land into consented development land is the modern alchemy, conjuring value out of what can be unpromising assets. This can often bring rewarding levels of financial security to people who may have had land but only limited cash reserves previously. Our skills can help greatly in that process.

Featured experience

The Strategic Land team deals frequently with a range of “Strategic Land Contracts” (see our “Expertise” list below). These are often used to get developer or promoter expertise into the process of changing farmland or garden land into housing or commercial land, using their tactical planning knowledge and design expertise to farmers and landowners, who have a different skillset. The expert developers or promoters also manage and fund the process in return for a costs refund plus a discounted purchase price or a success fee, which works well when the landowners may be unfamiliar with the planning process, and asset rich but cash limited.

Of course, our legal expertise is very relevant and often used on former industrial or brownfield land too.

There are relatively few firms with meaningful experience of these complicated contracts, and none in the Thames Valley with the number of experts and range of experience that FSP has in this area of work.