Louise is a Partner in the Agriculture and Landed Estates team.
Drawn back to her farming roots, Louise, having enjoyed over a decade of experience specialising in Real Estate Investment has a comprehensive understanding of property transactions enabling her to offer well-rounded legal advice to farmers, landowners and investors.
She enjoys working with rural businesses and landowners on property matters and was awarded Fellowship of the Agricultural Law Association, in February 2025 a badge of excellence acknowledging her ability to advise on all current issues including transactions, successions and entries into sustainable or environmental land uses.
Louise likes to meet with her clients personally and see the property on which she is instructed. Not only does this help to better understand the issues but it ensures that each solution is personal and aligned with the client’s goals without endless written enquiries.
Most of her transactional work involves the sale or purchase of farms, studs, country houses, woodlands and drawing tenancy agreements (both Agricultural Tenancies Act 1995 (Farm Business Tenancies (FBT’s)) and Agricultural Holdings Act (AHA) tenancies), and grazing licenses. The new drive to implement ELMS with Sustainable Farming Initiatives, Biodiversity Net Gain projects and management of natural capital assets is all part of her bailiwick.
Recent examples of how Louise has supported clients include:
- Negotiating with a habitat bank company, an option, lease and habitat management agreement for bio-diversity net gain (BNG) purposes;
- Tax-efficient succession planning for farmers who wished to safeguard the farm as it passes to the next generation including the drafting and renegotiation of partner agreements and gifting of assets;
- Enabling a land swap between neighbouring landowners to support their future individual intentions for their land holdings;
- The acquisition of numerous parcels of agricultural land increasing the clients’ portfolio of land: advising on overage agreements; Endowments and Glebe Measure 1976 requirements; rights of way; riparian rights; tenancy issues including rent arrears;
- Acquisition of commercial and amenity woodlands;
- Acquisition of a stud farm from and overseas trust with tenant in occupation;
- Attending to the tenancies while assisting in the management and sale of a large estate subject to numerous AST’s, FBT’s, commercial, plus licence arrangements;
- Acting on the purchase of an unregistered estate advising on the options available in relation to the right of way running through the property as well as riparian rights and other unregistered property interests.
Real Estate Investment experience include:
- property due diligence involved in the corporate sale of an SPV consisting over 8000 units to a large institutional investor;
- acquisition of a portfolio of freehold and leasehold properties consisting of over 1000 units;
- devising an innovative solution to enable property transactions to be completed in time for a key house builder reporting deadline.