Practices

Real Estate Finance

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. Construction is slated to begin in late 2022.
  • We represented of one of the largest U.S. life insurance companies in a $50 million refinancing of a multi-family 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.
  • We represented a private equity real estate investment fund formed by an affiliate of a national homebuilder and a global investment management firm for a $186 million acquisition and land development loan to a national development company. The loan financed the acquisition of a 759 acre land assemblage and provided funds to complete all necessary site work and lot improvements for the project, a 775-lot residential development in Loudoun County, Virginia. The lots were under contract for sale to three national homebuilders upon completion of improvement of the lots on a rolling quarterly takedown schedule. The representation included assisting in the structuring of the transaction and then drafting and negotiating all relevant loan documents. These included a highly structured completion guaranty and subordination agreements between our client and each of the national-homebuilder purchasers of the lots as well as an intercreditor agreement with the seller who provided seller financing secured by a portion of the project.

Meet the New Normal in Commercial Real Estate Investment

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