Sue is a Senior Associate in the Residential Property team.
She is a Chartered Fellow Legal Executive with CILEX and helps people throughout the country looking to buy their first home, to move up or down the property ladder or to formalise property ownership arrangements. She deals with freehold and leasehold sales and purchases, lease extensions, the transfer of property following divorce or relationship breakdown, transfers of equity or gifts of property between families, declarations of trust between co-owners where property is not owned equally, part-exchange deals between homeowners and the developers of new build properties, homes purchased through the government’s help to buy scheme, property being bought or sold at auction and the practical aspects of re-mortgaging.
She acts for private individuals and for companies with a residential property portfolio. She is one of a small number of lawyers able to help blind or visually impaired clients to navigate the paperwork associated with the conveyancing process.
Recent examples of how Sue has helped clients include:
- acting for a young couple in the purchase of their first home together, where each had an existing property to sell and all the transactions needed to complete at the same time to avoid a higher rate of stamp duty land tax;
- successfully negotiating a lease extension on behalf of the seller of a leasehold property where the buyer decided part-way through the transaction that the length of the lease was not long enough and threatened to pull out;
- drafting a declaration of trust for an unmarried couple buying a home together, where one person was contributing more to the purchase price and a declaration was needed to ensure they were legally recognised as owning a larger stake; and
- helping a buyer resolve a dispute with a surveyor about the impact of an adverse lease provision affecting the value of a leasehold property, which the buyer’s mortgage company required settling before they would agree to lend.