Every acre of land has development potential. This means that overage, or claw-back, is an important feature of the property landscape. Over the last few decades, developers, landowners and lawyers have gradually come to understand this peculiar area of law, and recent court decision have shown what happens when they get it wrong.
Every practitioner knows that most property documents are like dinner jackets, which can be drafted from a precedent library with a handful of standard amendments. But that’s not how overage works. Each overage agreement is like a show-stopping ballgown, carefully tailored to the needs of the parties and the particularities of the project. To design an overage agreement, you need to understand how the key components such as triggers and approvals work, and how they can be used to allocate risk, reward and control between landowners and developers.
In A Practical Guide to the Law of Overage, Kamran Rahman distils this fascinating topic into an easy-to-follow, commercially focused guide for anyone involved in property development. Using typical scenarios s well as drawing on recent caselaw, he explains what the commercial risks are, and how those risks are allocated by different legal structures. Whether you’re starting off in the field, or already have a few schemes under your belt, this important book brings together everything you need to understand the fundamentals of what you’re advising on.
