Approx. Price for Solicitor for Land Sale

[elise2000]

Hi All

What would a sensible price be for a solicitor to handle the sale of a 1 acre piece of grazing land, £40k value? Needs an uplift clause on it, but no other complications.

Have had a couple of estimates of around £2500 which seem steep to me (compared to residential conveyancing prices), but are land transactions charged higher than residential ones perhaps?

Thanks

[alscar]

I bought land last in 2007 ( 7 acres / £43k ) and my solicitor charged £750.
Using BOE inflated numbers this translates to about £1,300 today.
Based solely on this I would agree the £2,500 sounds expensive but everything these days seems to be that way !

[elise2000]

alscar said:

I bought land last in 2007 ( 7 acres / £43k ) and my solicitor charged £750.
Using BOE inflated numbers this translates to about £1,300 today.
Based solely on this I would agree the £2,500 sounds expensive but everything these days seems to be that way !

Thanks. Will keep looking!

[Lonoxe]

I bought just over 3 acres last year and paid neatly 5k for solicitor. If you trust the work, then I’d just go with the 2.5k. It’s unnecessary expensive for sure

[blueg33]

If the land is registered and has simple rights and restrictions with no complex overage clauses. I reckon about £1700 plus VAT. It s a pretty easy job, easier than a house.

However, an uplift or overage clause complicates it and will take a bit of legal to and fro and is a bit more specialist. I don’t think the quotes are far off.

Edited by blueg33 on Sunday 7th December 04:02

[mattybrown]

2024 just over half an acre of paddock cost me just over £1800 in legal fees. (South East)

[Snow and Rocks]

I bought a few acres in 2022 and covered both the sellers and my own legal costs.

Both solicitors came back with £750+vat each.

The land was registered but was part of a much larger (500+ acre) parcel so I had to get an architectural technician to draw up a plan for the land registry which was another £200+vat.

[LooneyTunes]

Your overage clause is a big unknown. I’ve had 5-figure legal fees on one of those alone (because the vendor didn’t really know what he wanted and his solicitor was quite easily confused).

Have paid as little as £1k for a simple land conveyance, without any overage clauses etc. Vendor was a gentleman, his solicitor was known to mine, no messing around with surveys/finance etc and my solicitor had done quite nicely out of me that year already.

I don’t think the quotes sound too bad.

Going back to the overage, do you have a simple set of bullet points agreed between you and the purchaser regarding the key terms or its general objective? Getting that sorted between you can simplify it considerably. I would expect vendor to draft the clause.

[elise2000]

Thanks all.

Maybe the quotes are ok then.

There is an uplift clause (in case of pp being granted) in place with the vendors who sold to us that expires in a couple of years. There will be another one in place between ourselves and the purchasers for 25 years.

[blueg33]

elise2000 said:

Thanks all.

Maybe the quotes are ok then.

There is an uplift clause (in case of pp being granted) in place with the vendors who sold to us that expires in a couple of years. There will be another one in place between ourselves and the purchasers for 25 years.

The overage can be a minefield. If its badly drafted the buyers solicitors will come back time and again.

In my experience, unless they are drafted by a development lawyer they are usually badly drafted. You wont get a development lawyer for anything close to £2k.

[LooneyTunes]

blueg33 said:

The overage can be a minefield. If its badly drafted the buyers solicitors will come back time and again.

In my experience, unless they are drafted by a development lawyer they are usually badly drafted. You wont get a development lawyer for anything close to £2k.

Blueg33 will, I dare say, have many examples. It just to highlight the possible complexity, a few (non-exhaustive) examples of things the OP might want to consider:

Trigger: Grant of PP:
- for what? Any exclusions?
- arising from an application by whom?
- over what area of the site?
- with conditions added by council? Even if they make the proposed development less viable?
- against what valuation(s)?
- net of fees or gross uplift?

What about things not requiring PP? (e.g. permitted development)
Hard cliff or taper on the condition?
First approved application only? Or subsequent ones as well?

Much of how you’ll want it drafting will depend on whether you’re trying to prevent development, get a second bite of the cherry if you think there’s some prospect of development, or simply thinking “why not?”. The more you want to prevent or benefit from development the more thought needs to go into how the clause could be circumvented. Of course, the game on the other side is likely to be keeping it as limited as possible.

I am working on a project at the moment where there is an overage clause. The vendor/their solicitor didn’t know what they really wanted it to say so, astonishingly, let me and my lawyer draft it. It’s frankly not worth the paper it’s written on but the vendor got what he wanted even though we were clear with him (even to the extent of including supplementary documentation with worked examples) that his chances of ever seeing any money from it were slim. All he really cared about was being able to say to people that he’d got an overage clause.

[blueg33]

LooneyTunes said:

blueg33 said:

The overage can be a minefield. If its badly drafted the buyers solicitors will come back time and again.

In my experience, unless they are drafted by a development lawyer they are usually badly drafted. You wont get a development lawyer for anything close to £2k.

Blueg33 will, I dare say, have many examples. It just to highlight the possible complexity, a few (non-exhaustive) examples of things the OP might want to consider:

Trigger: Grant of PP:
- for what? Any exclusions?
- arising from an application by whom?
- over what area of the site?
- with conditions added by council? Even if they make the proposed development less viable?
- against what valuation(s)?
- net of fees or gross uplift?

What about things not requiring PP? (e.g. permitted development)
Hard cliff or taper on the condition?
First approved application only? Or subsequent ones as well?

Much of how you ll want it drafting will depend on whether you re trying to prevent development, get a second bite of the cherry if you think there s some prospect of development, or simply thinking why not? . The more you want to prevent or benefit from development the more thought needs to go into how the clause could be circumvented. Of course, the game on the other side is likely to be keeping it as limited as possible.

I am working on a project at the moment where there is an overage clause. The vendor/their solicitor didn t know what they really wanted it to say so, astonishingly, let me and my lawyer draft it. It s frankly not worth the paper it s written on but the vendor got what he wanted even though we were clear with him (even to the extent of including supplementary documentation with worked examples) that his chances of ever seeing any money from it were slim. All he really cared about was being able to say to people that he d got an overage clause.

Yup - you saved me loads of typing! Thanks

[harryt]

Are there no templates for these?
And AI will totally mess up (in a good way for John Doe) the legal profession within 5-10 years.
"Mr / Ms / Thing Online AI solicitor service, please draw up an overage clause to put into the sales contract for Land Registry title number XXXXX. I'd like to be due money if the current agreed value of this land increases for any reasons that you'd care to scrape off the squillions of similar existing agreements that you can get your bits on".
It's about time the legal profession got the incoming shafting it deserves.
Be hard pressed to find a bigger bunch of lazy workshy crooks.
Junior docs probably come close these days maybe.
If you think killing people by withdrawing your service for money is criminal (which I do).
Politicians obviously.

[blueg33]

harryt said:

Are there no templates for these?
And AI will totally mess up (in a good way for John Doe) the legal profession within 5-10 years.
"Mr / Ms / Thing Online AI solicitor service, please draw up an overage clause to put into the sales contract for Land Registry title number XXXXX. I'd like to be due money if the current agreed value of this land increases for any reasons that you'd care to scrape off the squillions of similar existing agreements that you can get your bits on".
It's about time the legal profession got the incoming shafting it deserves.
Be hard pressed to find a bigger bunch of lazy workshy crooks.
Junior docs probably come close these days maybe.
If you think killing people by withdrawing your service for money is criminal (which I do).
Politicians obviously.

Every overage transaction is different. The deal is always individually negotiated, do you need to wrap in collaboration agreements, promotion agreements? How have you agreed to deduct costs, to value the uplift, what are the timescales, howe will it be covered in the transfer, what right will be granted for services, what is the trigger point, what uses are expected?

There is no template for this stuff because there are too many variables