We advise clients in structuring, documenting, closing, servicing, restructuring, and enforcing real estate debt and equity transactions. With more than 85 lawyers in our Real Estate Finance Group throughout the United States, our law firm offers nationally recognized skill and experience, local market knowledge, and a comprehensive understanding of the issues that drive transactions and markets.
Our team is one of the most active in the country and is home to many of the nation’s leading lawyers who have played pivotal roles in developing, structuring, and negotiating an impressive range of complex, high-profile real estate finance transactions.
Our work includes helping clients execute on individual and programmatic transactions involving a wide variety of deal structures and project types as well as helping clients resolve a problem or pursue an opportunity including those involving “legacy” assets. Our active relationships with important industry participants help to identify opportunities and trends and to facilitate transactions.
Experience
- We represented a commercial bank, as agent and lender, in the origination and syndication of a $155 million A/B construction loan. The loan was made on a joint and several basis to affiliated joint venture co-borrowers for the development of a high rise office building located within a waterfront redevelopment district as part of a mixed-use, multi-owner, master land development condominium. Upon completion of the project, the sponsors will relocate their respective headquarters to the project. In addition to advising on all facets of the origination and syndication of the financing, the engagement included review and guidance regarding various redevelopment agreements, the master condominium structure, three headquarter leases entered into under a master lease / sublease structure, and certain incentive programs including certain tax credits used to support a portion of the debt service payments.
- We serve as lead finance and real estate counsel to River District Neighborhood Investors LLC, master developer of The River District, a sprawling, $1 billion project to transform the Mississippi Riverfront in New Orleans. The project will revitalize 27 acres of waterfront land adjacent to the Morial Convention Center New Orleans. Ballard Spahr attorneys are helping to guide the project through multiple phases of infrastructure development and construction of residential, office, and retail components. Phase One focuses on expanding and enhancing gathering space to create a dynamic hub of commerce, culture, and community through construction of facilities for entertainment, housing, arts and culture, retail food and beverage, street-front shops, public areas, and green space.
- We represented a special servicer and the corresponding collateral manager of a distressed first lien commercial real estate loan held by a CLO trust. The collateral property was an older office building in Falls Church, Virginia, with approximately 220,000 square feet of space. The property’s value had dropped over time due to the building’s age, declining occupancy, macroeconomic conditions, and other factors. When the senior loan matured, the loan sponsor was unable to obtain refinancing. For a variety of reasons, the collateral property was deemed a good candidate for conversion from office use to multifamily residential. We conducted the foreclosure, modified and terminated office leases to help position the collateral for adaptive reuse as multifamily housing, and represented the client in its appeal of assessed property taxes by the local taxing authority.
- We represented of one of the largest U.S. life insurance companies in a $50 million refinancing of a multifamily rental project consisting of two interconnected residential buildings above a two-story parking podium containing 210 apartment units and 316 parking spaces. The representation included assisting in the structuring of the transaction and then drafting and negotiating all relevant loan documents including partial repayment and non-recourse carve-out guaranties from certain trust entities. At the time of closing, the project was recently constructed and in the process of final completion and lease-up and the representation also involved addressing certain issues relating to the near-complete status of the project, the obtaining of a final certificate of occupancy and the leasing-up of the project.
