Our experienced residential development legal teams and well established strategic land expertise position us to deliver real commercial value – helping housebuilders and developers unlock land opportunities and accelerate development potential.
Emma Honey
Partner
Chloe Howard-Smith
Partner
Lucy Smallwood
Partner
Michelmores has excellent residential development and commercial teams with high-class solicitors who progress matters quickly, providing all-round excellent advice for their clients.
Chambers UK 2026
At Michelmores, we understand that strategic land development is a complex endeavour. Our specialist team work alongside housebuilders, developers, promoters and landowners to help you navigate the legal, planning, and commercial challenges that come with unlocking land for development and turn strategic land opportunities into long‑term value. Combining deep sector knowledge with a highly collaborative and commercially focused approach, we help clients navigate complexity with confidence—unlocking land, accelerating progress and supporting the delivery of thriving new communities.
Strategic land represents a long-term opportunity to shape communities and deliver sustainable growth and plays a pivotal role in meeting future housing and infrastructure needs. Securing its full potential requires more than legal expertise—it demands foresight, strong partnerships, patience, expert advice and a creative approach to risk and reward.
Our team works at every stage of the land lifecycle, including:
Our Strategic Land team brings together leading lawyers with deep experience in:
We work closely with developers, promoters, and landowners to structure deals that are commercially sound, legally robust, and aligned with long-term planning objectives.
We know that every site—and every client—is different. That's why we take a bespoke approach, offering.
Our goal is simple: to help you unlock land value efficiently, ethically, and profitably.
Strategic land projects succeed when teams communicate well and work towards a shared objective. We build long-lasting partnerships with our clients, landowners, advisors and local planning authorities—ensuring that complex sites progress smoothly and constructively.
Every site is different. We think creatively about risk management, deal structures and delivery strategies, helping our clients unlock opportunities others may overlook. From innovative land assembly to bespoke promotion or equalisation mechanisms, our advice is tailored to commercial reality.
We understand the pressures housebuilders and developers face—viability, timing, policy shifts, investor expectations and operational demands. Our strategic land team blends technical excellence with a strong commercial lens, ensuring decisions are informed, pragmatic and aligned with your wider business goals. We help you anticipate challenges, seize opportunities and create lasting commercial value—while supporting the creation of sustainable, well-designed places for future communities. We're not just lawyers—we're strategic partners who understand the commercial realities of land development.
As part of our Destination 2030 Strategy we seek to deliver our legal services through Collaboration, Commerciality and Creativity. Collaboration underpins everything we do. Working alongside you as a business means team-on-team integration, wider commercial support and access to our extensive offering of knowledge, thought leadership and industry events. As a firm, Michelmores has a proud record of working with many key clients for several decades, and relish the prospect of forming longstanding relationship with our clients. Commerciality drives our approach to transactions and the way we will provide legal services. We are a friendly and approachable team, and always ‘solutions-driven’. Creativity sets us apart from our competitors. We are embracing the role of AI and its ability to drive efficiency in providing legal services, and we prize working in an entrepreneurial environment where we think of the best way to solve problems.
Decades of experience in acting for housebuilders and developers across England and Wales.
We pride ourselves on forging lasting relationships – our clients trust us to navigate the complexities of strategic land from first step to final completion.
We understand the development landscape, market cycles and how best to structure deals that deliver enduring value whilst managing risk and tax exposure.
No one-size-fits-all here. Every agreement is bespoke and shaped around your long-term goals.
Our strategic land team brings extensive experience in advising landowners, developers, promoters, local authorities and other stakeholders on complex, high value schemes nationwide. From initial structuring through to delivery, we help clients maximise value and potential of land while navigating planning, environmental and legal complexities. The projects below reflect the depth of our capabilities, our trusted partnerships and the outcomes we help our clients achieve.
Advising regional developer in relation to a c700 unit scheme with promotion, land acquisition and construction joint venture arrangements within a corporate wrapper.
Acting on a multi-phased urban extension project in Dorset for a housebuilder (working with other development partners, the Duchy and their advisors) including the acquisition of phases, development, communal infrastructure arrangements, bank funding, phase set up and ultimate disposal of dwellings and commercial units.
Advising national developer client on the acquisition, development, set up and sale of a 275 unit scheme in the South West involving complex negotiations of access rights, putting in place leasehold structures for ecological mitigation land, advising on surface water drainage, contractual deferred payment structures and overage.
Acting for a renowned regional developer in the assembly of a multi-phased residential development site in East Devon, involving multiple landowners and complex access and equalisation arrangements.
Advising on a strategic option to purchase via multiple phase transfers subject to the grant of satisfactory planning permission. Detailed advice was provided on third party interests, planning risks and conditionality, environmental considerations, the conditions precedent to exercising the option, price and valuation formulas, provisions around BNG and securing BNG.
Advising housebuilder on the acquisition of a number of sites with immediate sub-sale to a joint venture party with ongoing joint venture development arrangements.
The team work with you, and you know that they only have your interests at the heart of their work. They engage with industry and many disciplines to understand the challenges of land ownership.
Chambers UK 2026
If you're promoting or acquiring strategic land, or looking to partner with landowners, we'd love to hear from you. Contact our Strategic Land team today to explore how we can support your next project.
