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Practice/Industry Group Overview
The nation's leading businesses and institutions seek Edwards Wildman Palmer LLP for comprehensive real estate services involving complex public/private development relationships, sophisticated financing structures, and local, state, and federal regulatory and permitting schemes. Our development, transportation, leasing, and financing practices represent developers, lenders, public authorities, businesses, universities and other institutional landowners in all kinds of transactions. These include acquisition, sale, development, financing, and operation of real estate.
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Services Available
Affordable Housing Our experience with complex affordable housing developments is another aspect of our real estate practice that sets our firm apart. Our attorneys address tax, financing, permitting and real estate issues for developers, syndicators, investors and lenders in projects of all sizes throughout the nation. We help navigate the use of tax-exempt bond financing and tax credits, separately or in combination, for the development of affordable housing. Our experience includes working with tax credits for low-income housing, historic rehabilitation, new markets and Brownfields. Construction and Design We are regularly involved in sophisticated construction matters, primarily on behalf of owners and lenders. Our construction law services include: - Procurement strategy and method of delivery selection
- Contract development, drafting and negotiation
- Bid protests and other procurement matters
- Contract interpretation and administration
- Claims analysis, and
- Informal and formal dispute resolution, including mediation, arbitration, and litigation
Our real estate lawyers provide advice on contracts, joint ventures and operational matters and work with our firm's litigators to resolve construction disputes informally, in arbitration or in the courtroom. The firm is often sought by clients to help with the procurement processes for design/build projects. Development and Permitting Our development experience extends from coast to coast, from the biggest urban centers to the most rural areas. We handle major waterfront projects, mixed-use downtown hotel, residential and commercial condominiums, air-rights projects, subsidized rental housing and state-of-the-art biotechnology facilities. In more suburban communities, our development experience includes shopping centers, multi-family housing, office parks and the siting of wireless telecommunications towers. We have earned a highly regarded reputation for complicated urban redevelopment projects. Our attorneys devise and implement development and environmental permitting strategies involving large, mostly undeveloped tracts and land within dense urban contexts. These strategies lay the foundation for phased development over long periods of time - sometimes generations. Our real estate attorneys recognize the need for flexibility in such phased developments, accommodating changes in sequencing, uses, structure locations, dimensions or other aspects of the development program. In these undertakings, we represent the client from the acquisition and early land use and infrastructure planning phase through addressing encumbrance issues, procuring entitlements, and construction. Environmental Our group includes lawyers who focus on the environmental aspects of real estate transactions. These attorneys have diverse backgrounds in industry, government and private practice, and our work includes agency negotiation and advocacy for our clients at the Federal, State and local levels. Our environmental lawyers counsel, advise and negotiate for the firm's private and public clients in connection with business and asset acquisitions, financing and dispositions. These services include structuring Brownfields solutions, where the regulatory structure and risk management associated with the particular asset makes this a viable solution. Finance Edwards Wildman regularly represents national and regional lenders and borrowers in sophisticated real estate financings. These range from traditional construction and term mortgage loan transactions to mezzanine loan and equity structures to public finance facilities. Because of our firm's across-the-board depth, we often form teams to address a client's specific business needs. Working with lawyers from our Tax Group, for example, our real estate attorneys represent for-profit and not-for-profit developers, syndicators, investors and tenant organizations in connection with low-income housing, historic rehabilitation and new markets tax-credit transactions. Leasing Our real estate lawyers have extensive commercial lease experience. In addition to representing owners of downtown office buildings and suburban office parks, we negotiate office, laboratory and manufacturing space leases for the firm's business clients throughout the nation. The firm's experience includes drafting and negotiating long-term financeable ground leases, single-user build-to-suit leases and retail leases in shopping centers, mixed-use projects and airports. Mixed-Use Projects The legal demands of major, urban mixed-use developments illustrate our firm's unique capabilities. A recent, high-stakes project stands out: - Represented the developer of a mixed-use condominium project containing 350 luxury residential units, a 193-room five-star hotel, a 100,000 square-foot spa, fitness and sports facility, a state-of-the-art 19-screen movie theater, retail space and a below-grade parking garage. We worked with the client to create a tiered condominium structure with four separate condominiums within a fifth master condominium, allowing each distinct use to function independently of the others while at the same time ensuring that the project as a whole operates efficiently and cohesively.
Private and Public Partnerships Our real estate attorneys represent a broad range of public and private developers, contractors and lenders in creating and working out real estate projects. Our attorneys have extensive experience in phased, multi-use, urban projects. That experience includes involvement in projects where one or more public agencies play substantial roles as parties to the transaction, not just as issuers of permits. Other Real Estate Matters We also have extensive real estate litigation and workout/foreclosure bankruptcy expertise. As with any full service real estate department, we also assist clients with matters such as solving title problems, buying, selling and financing real estate, organizing real estate ownership entities, and providing advice on the full range of problems faced by owners and managers of real estate.
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