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You the Business > Property Development

Development Land Purchase and Development Conveyancing

Partner Paul Roberts has extensive experience of acting for developers in land acquisition and disposal. Often these areas involve conditional contracts subject to planning, options, right of pre-emption and so on. The Solicitor involved has to have a good knowledge of  both Conveyancing and Building and Construction Law and be able to apply this knowledge to deal with problems that from time to time arise.

Development land purchase has particular issues for clients and numerous problems can exist in the purchase of land for development. Sometimes problems can be overcome by routes such as Defective Title Indemnity Insurance as in extreme cases valuation can be considerably affective the client will either have to withdraw or negotiate price reductions to compensate. Issues that we have come across in the last few years on development land purchase:

1. Land in the sale plan outside the area of the sellers registered title.
2. Land and strip separating the services from the main public sewer and the land and strip separating the development site from the public highway
3. Restrictive covenants limiting the use of the land which in one case effectively totally prohibited development
4. Rights to park and rights of way or other service routes through the site which restrict development
5. Visibility splays over land not owned by the vendor of the site
6. Impractical planning consent restrictions
7. Land contamination
8. Mine shafts or similar physical problems affecting the development site

Site acquisition for a developer involve considerable responsibility as the sums of monies involved are often quite large and value of the land is potentially the developed value not the sale and purchase price. The Solicitor acting for the Buyer needs to be aware and look out for numerous issues examples of which are as follows:-

Planning Consent: Can all the planning conditions be complied with. If all of the land comprised in the planning consent being acquired by the purchaser or available for use by the purchaser.

Services: Are these available including adequate run off areas for surface water drainage or sewage treatment plant drainage.

Ransom Strips: Are any ransom strips applicable to planning, access or services.

Searches: careful investigation needs to be made of Local Search, Mining Search, Environmental Search, Drainage Search, Commons Search, Coal Search, Limestone Search and in appropriate areas Tin, Clay and Brine.

Boundaries: Exact location of the boundary may be quite unimportant to the previous owner of the site but may be of vital importance to the builder who is trying to maximize the number of properties on the site.

Options or Conditional Contract: Options and Conditional Contracts may have the same effect but they are quite different. An option is what is says an option to buy the site in a particular period whereas a Conditional Contract obliges the Buyer to purchase a site if the terms and conditions of the contract are met. Before a builder can commit to a conditional contract he needs to have all title investigations carried out, finance available and ensure that the contract terms enable him to withdraw from the contract should the planning permission not be acceptable.

As can be seen above there are a number of issues in land acquisition which must be carefully investigated before a developer should proceed to acquire property.

For expert advice please contact Paul Roberts, Head of Residential Property and Partner.