Karl Brown

Karl is a Partner in the Commercial Property team specialising in the acquisition and disposal of development land. Karl also has extensive experience in acting for developers on sales to housing associations.

Karl’s expertise includes working with national house builder companies including David Wilson Homes, Barratt Homes and Crest.

Karl is the inaugural Chair of Clarke Willmott’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Group. In 2019 Karl founded and launched the Bristol Property Inclusion Charter (the first city property inclusion charter in the UK) to help drive diversity and inclusion in the Bristol Property Sector and Karl chairs the Bristol Property Inclusion Commission which oversees the progress of the Charter.

Karl joined Clarke Willmott LLP in 2005 after working at Stokes Partners LLP. He is a past president of a Bristol business group called the Bristol Junior Chamber and he was a founder member of the Bristol Learning City Partnership Board which was chaired by the Bristol Mayor. In 2017 Karl was included in the final shortlist for Lawyer of the Year in the Bristol Law Society Annual Awards.

Karl is currently a social mobility ambassador for the Law Society and a member of the Faculty of Business and Law Advisory Board at the University of the West of England.

Experience

• Working alongside Clarke Willmott Chief Executive Stephen Rosser in acting for a strategic landowner and planner promoter on disposals, landowner/developer agreements and infrastructure agreements in respect of 124 acres of mixed use development land in Exeter.
• Purchase of residential development land. Acting for a house builder in drafting a contract, transfer deed, early access licence and a complicated overage deed and dealing with exchange and completion.
• Affordable housing sale. Acting for a house builder in exchanging and completing an unconditional Land and Golden Brick Agreement and exchanging a conditional Land and Golden Brick Agreement with the same housing association, within three weeks of being instructed.
• Highways. Acting for a land owner client on the different powers of adoption which a local authority has to adopt a road or footpath. The advice provided by Karl included a summary of the discretionary power of a local highways authority to get a road/footpath adopted under section 228 of the Highways Act 1980.
• Consortium Sites. Acting for a house builder in dealing with documentation regulating rights and responsibilities for infrastructure costs and partitioning of land between it and two other house builders on a large development site.