Commercial Property Services - Video
A copy of our commercial property services video should be viewable below. A transcript
of the file is also provided for your convenience. We hope you find the content
useful and informative.
Freephone: 0808 129 3320 or email us
using our online enquiry form
or visit www.sm-commercial.co.uk.
Transcript - Commercial Property Services
Hi. I am
Deborah Powell and I head the firm’s commercial property team here at Simpson
Millar.
At Simpson Millar we pride ourselves on our commercial hands on approach to commercial
property work. We aim to provide clear commercial advice at competitive rates with
transactions been delivered on time and within budget. We realise that often in
commercial property transactions the underlying objective can get lost along the
way and unless the transaction is pro-actively managed it can get over complicated,
lengthy with resulting increases in both budget and timescales. We are committed
to cutting through this process by providing focused cost effective advice with
close Partner involvement at all times.
Our specialist team of lawyers can deal with a wide of areas including; acquisition
and development work, commercial leases, housing associations, licensed premises,
pension funds, preparing environmental issues, property finance and construction
advice.
I think the problem with a lot of commercial property advice is that clients do
not get the right advice from the start so they will get advised by someone maybe
whose junior, not a Partner and wont really know what they are doing they will not
have that much experience and sometimes that will be OK for that particular transaction
but other times if that is a more complex matter they need Partner involvement right
at the outset so they can pick up what the key issues are and where the transaction
should go to i.e you really need to get it right from the start and if you don’t
the matter can very quickly deteriorate into long drawn out transactions with huge
costs and ramble all over the place and don’t really get to the end very quickly.
That is my experience where clients can sometimes get bad advice from bigger law
firms, for example they just get stuck with junior lawyers who don’t really know
what they are doing who still charge them an arm and a leg for doing it.
I have acted for landlords and I’ve acted for tenants on all sorts of leasehold
property matters for a long time and I’ve got 20 years worth of experience for acting
for all sorts of clients, big Plcs right down to Mrs Jones taking a lease of a butchers
shops and I have acted on both sides of transactions so I know the issues from both
sides really.
The main things we are trying to sell at Simpson Millar is the fact that you don’t
have to pay through the nose to get good quality legal advice and quite often at
the bigger firms you can end up paying an awful lot of money for a junior lawyer
to give you not very commercial advice whereas if you come to a smaller firm, the
overheads are less, you get charged less but you also get good quality commercial
advice from a Partner with 20 years worth of experience.
Things that are key at the moment in this market are advising on purchase contracts
eg can you get out of them, can you stop someone getting out of them, looking at
leases to see whether or not you are been overcharged on service charge, also looking
at property portfolios generally to make sure that properties that you have got
rid of that have been leasehold that there are no nasty skeletons hiding in the
closet, because basically once you have a leasehold property if you get rid of it,
even if you assign it across or even underlet it they have a nasty habit of coming
back to you in the future and a lot of people don’t realise that they thought they
had got rid of that problem but in fact the lease is still existing, the tenant
has gone bust and the landlord is now coming back to you to ask you to pay the rent
so we can look at your portfolio and work out how many of those properties you have
got in your portfolio and assess what the risk of those properties coming back to
haunt you is.
We also advise on claw back provisions in those contracts, onerous conditions and
planning conditions.
In terms of the range of clients that we act for in the past I have acted for Plcs
right down to individuals to small owner managed businesses, medium sized owner
managed businesses, charities, clubs, associations, housing associations, ecclesiastical
work and farmers. You don’t have to get too far down the road where most transactions
involving commercial property if you get someone who knows what they are doing then
they can usually save you time and money. It can add money to a lot of transactions
but there are some transactions where they are just fine and there isn’t a lot of
risk or there isn’t a lot you can save the client for the odd one or two but for
quite a few transactions you can.
Tax is another area where you can save them money, there are just different ways
of dealing with things and different ways of achieving objectives and things to
watch out for and traps to fall into and things to ask for its that kind of stuff
that experience of 20 years gives you that enables you to give that advice to the
client.
We have acted for an awful lot of clients, different clients and different needs
and we have a lot of skill in advising those clients.
Get in touch today and find out how we can help you:
Freephone: 0808 129 3320 or email us
using our online enquiry form.
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