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Specialist property team sees 31% jump in work

THE specialist "plot sales team" in the Property department at North law firm Ward Hadaway has seen demand for its work rise by over 30% in the past year.

The team, which acts for a number of the UK’s leading housebuilders, successfully completed the sale of over 2,800 new homes in the 12 months to the end of April 2016 at new development sites across the North, from the Scottish borders down to the Midlands and stretching across to North Wales.  This represents over 2% of all new homes built during the period in England.

Ward Hadaway’s 33-strong plot sales team is one of the largest in the North of England with team members based at all three of the firm’s offices in Newcastle, Leeds and Manchester.

As well as plot sales work (the sale of newly completed homes for housebuilder clients), the specialist team also deals with part exchange transactions, where the buyer of the new home is selling their existing home to the housebuilder.

The team successfully completed over 630 part-exchange acquisitions and onward sales for housebuilder clients over the year to the end of April 2016.

This means that in just 12 months, the team worked on more than 3,400 separate transactions, an increase of 31% on the number of transactions it worked on in the previous year. On average, the team completed more than 13 transactions every working day of the year.

Lesley Fairclough

Lesley Fairclough

Lesley Fairclough, Partner and Head of Development at Ward Hadaway, said: “This is an absolutely tremendous performance by the team and is a testament to their expertise, hard work and dedication.

“We were extremely busy in the year to April 2015 but this past year has outstripped that and demonstrates the importance of the plot sales team to thousands of different transactions right across the UK housing market.

“Not only are these transactions a vital part of business for housebuilders, each one of them also represents someone’s home and this is something which we never lose sight of when we are carrying out this work.

“We aim to continue to help our housebuilder clients to pursue their business goals and achieve their targets as well as ensuring that their customers get a speedy, efficient and professional service when buying their new homes.”

The transactions carried out by the plot sales team over the course of the year to the end of April 2016 cover work on a wide range of different housing developments, including both freehold and leasehold.

As well as more straightforward matters, the plot sales team has also dealt with more complex legal structures or estate set-ups, some involving sales and marketing agents and Government and other funding initiatives such as Help to Buy.

Please note that this briefing is designed to be informative, not advisory and represents our understanding of English law and practice as at the date indicated. We would always recommend that you should seek specific guidance on any particular legal issue.

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