Property Associate
Location: Birmingham or Manchester
Contract Type: Permanent
The Brief:
We are looking to recruit an England & Wales qualified lawyer with 3-6 years’ PQE to join our fantastic, growing mixed-use development team in Birmingham or Manchester.
We are looking for a lawyer who has had experience (whether acting for public or private sector clients) of development work, ideally large scale, mixed-use and/or residential-led schemes.
You will have the opportunity to be part of transactional teams supporting clients across the UK working alongside colleagues from our other offices and benefiting from our internal legal professional support network.
About the Team:
You will be joining our Property Development & Investment Team in Birmingham, our transactional real estate team, which is led by Lisa Middleton and is one of the leading and most well-established teams in the city. We’re part of our UK Property Group (and operate as a national team, rather than in regional silos), which means we regularly work with colleagues across our network of 8 offices in all the major business centres.
Our Property Development & Investment Team, more broadly, advises clients across the whole spectrum of their real estate requirements, covering acquisition, development, funding, investment and asset management requirements, with particular focus on major logistics and manufacturing projects, alternative asset classes (hotels, student accommodation and BtR), private sector residential development, public sector led development opportunities, new business park developments, Grade A office developments and investments, major infrastructure projects and nuclear sector support.
Our focus within our Birmingham and UK teams on a number of growth markets means that we are well placed to navigate and weather the volatile economic conditions the UK is currently experiencing and provide an excellent platform for any aspiring real estate lawyer to build a long term and secure career with the firm, itself a £500m+ turnover business with a global focus on a handful of key sectors, including Real Estate.
The development specialists within our Property Development & Investment Team are led in Birmingham by Tom Johnson and Rebecca Rowley, and the lawyers often work with colleagues across our other UK offices. We have a “single team” approach to working alongside our market-leading colleagues who enable us to provide an all-round service on the most complex and high value deals, covering planning, procurement, subsidy control, construction, environmental, CPO, energy and dispute resolution issues.
The increasing relationship between the public and private sector is at the heart of our development practice so the work you will do encompasses the largest, most complex and most exciting development projects for a mix of public and private sector clients across England and Wales, including acquisitions and disposals, collaborations and equalisation arrangements with other landowners, securing funding and investment, negotiating development agreements, master development agreements and lease structuring, and dealing with the property components of new corporate joint ventures.
Work highlights:
1. Silvertown: advising Lendlease (in JV with Starwood Capital) on the delivery of this £3.5bn new community in London Docklands
2. Smithfield Birmingham: advising Lendlease on the planning strategy for this £2bn residential led redevelopment of a major part of the city centre
3. Arena Central: advising Kier Property Developments on the delivery of this £700m new business quarter in the centre of Birmingham
4. Langarth Garden Village: advising Cornwall Council as landowner on planning, delivering and investing in a landmark new community of c.3550 homes, student accommodation, extra care, P&R, schools, energy centre and extensive greenspace and community facilities
5. Lovell: advising on their Thamesmead JV with Peabody to deliver two phases of the Peabody regen project
6. Homes England: advising on the provision of grant funding through their £multimillion HIF and (now) BIL programmes to facilitate housing delivery
Key Clients include:
7. Homes England
8. St Modwen
9. Birmingham City Council
10. Harworth Estates
11. Lovell Partnerships
12. Bricks Capital
13. Muse
14. HBD (Henry Boot)
15. Urban & Civic
16. IM Properties
17. Lendlease
18. Manchester City Council
19. LB Haringey
About the Person:
We are now looking to appoint a 3-6 years PQE property lawyer to join our team. Required experience/attributes include:
20. experience of advising developers/landowners procuring development of their land (such as local authorities), ideally large-scale, complex mixed use or residential led development
21. experience gained in a large commercial firm, or in-house legal team
22. a problem solver, who wants to work with the clients to understand their project and help them find the best way to deliver that
23. a proven team player, able to forge strong working relationships with colleagues in an agile environment
24. excellent academics, technically accomplished, with sound commercial judgment
25. the interpersonal skills necessary for developing and managing on-going relationships with an existing client base (and work collaboratively with other parties to help deliver development schemes) as well as helping to win and grow new opportunities