Senior Associate
Rachel is a Senior Associate in the Agriculture and Landed Estates teams.
She provides advice to landowners on the management, financing, development and sale and purchase of their land and property. This includes advising on ownership arrangements to ensure favourable tax treatment, conditional contracts and option agreements where land has been earmarked for development, overage and clawback agreements to maximise the return on land sales, negotiations for the grant and surrender of agricultural tenancies, applications to register land with the Land Registry and claims of entitlement to land via adverse possession.
Her clients include estate owners, farming families, private businesses, trusts and charitable organisations.
Examples of how Rachel has supported clients include:
- resolving numerous issues to facilitate the transfer of multiple assets, worth £18.5 million from one estate company to another as part of a refinancing deal;
- coordinating plot sales for a landed estate with residential, commercial and sporting interests, including option agreements and overage provisions, to secure additional remuneration for the estate owner;
- dividing up a family farm to minimise each family member’s potential inheritance tax liability while securing appropriate rights to ensure that it could be farmed as one unit; and
- successfully claiming ownership, by adverse possession, of a parcel of land on behalf of a farmer who had occupied it for over 20 years without challenge but who was not registered as the legal owner.