Paul is a commercial real estate lawyer with nearly 25 years’ experience of advising national and international investors and developers on real estate assets over the course of their natural life cycle.
During his career, Paul has acted for landlords, tenants, developers, local authorities, private equity houses, family offices, overseas investors, sovereign wealth funds and institutional UK funds. As a result, Paul has a fully balanced view of the typical challenges that arise on all manner of real estate transactions and is able to guide his clients through negotiations by providing sensible and commercial but robust advice.
Paul works with clients specialising across all asset classes, and his work has straddled the office, retail, leisure, industrial, logistics, data centre, residential, hotel, and student accommodation sectors. Paul is well versed in typical real estate holding structures and regularly acts on asset and share divestments, both offshore and onshore.
Paul's clients have included Barings, Blackstone, British Land, CBREIM, CCLA, Deutsche Finance International, Direct Line Insurance, Discovery Group, Bally’s, Hampshire Hospitals NHS Trust, Orchard Street Investment Management, PGIM, Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, Royal Sun Alliance, St James's Place, Tiger Developments, Unilever and a well-known Sovereign Wealth fund.
Experience
- Advising Blackstone in relation to the restructuring of its GBP1.8bn Tower portfolio and the subsequent work-out of the portfolio.
- Advising Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea on the GBP130m sale for a central London Borough Council of school land to be redeveloped for high end private residential development, involving complex overage and clawback negotiations.
- Advising Barings on the acquisition and subsequent GBP146m disposal of 40 Gracechurch Street, a substantial central London office building.