Neil Toner

Neil acted for Bouygues, on their London Road (Barking) mixed use project. The scheme delivers 100 Private Rented Sector flats, a 40,000 sq ft ASDA Supermarket, a number of smaller retail outlets and a new public square. Neil drafted and negotiated an acquisition and development agreement with the landowner (London Borough of Barking and Dagenham), a development and lease agreement with ASDA, an investment agreement for the supermarket reversion with Aviva and an agreement for lease with Grainger PLC for the PRS stock. Neil’s broad experience, spanning both housing and commercial property, assisted in ensuring that the competing stakeholders in the project all ended up with a scheme that worked for them.

Neil led the team implementing the property separation arrangements in one of the UK’s largest ever corporate demergers with a total consideration on excess of $5billion.  Neil’s work centred on the transfer of just over 3,000 properties over an 18 month period. Other advice provided by Neil during that period included commercial leaseholder security of tenure issues, on-going environmental liabilities, tunnelling project advice and residential tenants’ ‘rights of first refusal’ under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1987.

Neil acted for Family Mosaic Housing in connection with their phased conditional development agreement for the Heathside and Lethbridge Estates in Lewisham. The transaction involved discounted land being provided by the London Borough of Lewisham and grant being provided by the HCA in return for an equity stake in the 1,300 unit development being delivered by Family Mosaic. Neil’s work started with assisting Family Mosaic to finalise the Heads of Terms with Lewisham and included resolving various title issues, negotiating the conditional phased development agreement and drafting JV contracts with a private developer for joint delivery of a number of the Phases. Neil’s economics background came in handy when drafting the grant of equity provisions based on a financial viability model with surpluses and deficits cascading down through the 10 year phasing.

Neil acted for a charity which owns and operates a number of historic buildings of religious significance in preparing a ‘memorandum of understanding’ to encompass provisions covering issues as diverse as maintenance inspections through to the fees to be charged for human burials.

Neil acted for Wandle Housing Association on the agreements relating to the relocation and subsequent monitoring of a population of slow worms. It was a project which encapsulated Neil’s motto for development transactions which is ‘expect the unexpected’.