Solicitor – Admitted 1992
“Richard Honey is a pleasure to work with. He also has in-depth expertise and is always prepared to acknowledge the limitations of his personal knowledge and call upon others to support, who have not let me down.”
Legal 500 2024
Overview
I’m a Partner in the Transactional Real Estate team, with experience in acting for both the private sector and the public sector – giving me an insight into the mindset of both.
For the private sector, I have advised on office, retail and industrial properties, acting for owners and occupiers.
Public sector bodies for whom I have acted include police forces; fire and rescue services; local authorities; central government departments; executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies.
My work is extremely diverse and ranges from day-to-day estate management to high value, highly complex, time critical and (in particular with public sector bodies) politically sensitive matters. It includes sales, acquisitions, lettings and developments, asset management and developments. As necessary, I draw on additional expertise – be it property litigators; planners; environmentalists; construction lawyers; projects and PFI lawyers. We all know each other, and routinely work together to provide that seamless service.
The sites with which I deal are geographically dispersed, too. Because we are appointed to national public sector frameworks, we deal with properties, and clients based at sites across England and Wales. Distance is no impediment.
Recent experience
Advising the Mayor’s Office For Policing And Crime on its acquisition of The Empress State Building, Earls Court, London, for a purchase price of £250M. Whilst the building was already occupied by the Metropolitan Police Service, under a lease, for back office and operational functions, this freehold acquisition has secured the Met’s long-term occupation. Investment of £412M has transformed it into a new Counter Terrorism Operations Centre
Acting on the sale of a 19-hectare site as part of an important regeneration scheme, to deliver more than 1,650 new homes. There were complicated issues relating to phasing of sales, deferred payments, overage, planning, development obligations, security documentation, and procurement issues delivered to unusually short timescales
Acting for a central government department on a £45M refurbishment of a Grade II listed building to provide state of the art accommodation in a modern fit-for-purpose building. We were involved from the very earliest stage, providing advice on transaction structure; heads of terms; negotiating the development documentation, the lease to the department and ancillary documentation
