Practice Areas & Industries: Sullivan & Cromwell LLP

Practice/Industry Group Overview

Sullivan & Cromwell's global Real Estate Group engages in a multi-disciplinary practice. We negotiate and execute the full range of transactions related to the real estate industry. Our clients entrust the Firm with their most significant and complex real estate matters.

The Group combines the Firm's public and private market expertise, as well as innovative deal-making skills, to assist sophisticated clients in purchasing, selling, developing and financing real estate companies (public and private) and assets in the United States and throughout the world. The Group has also developed a specialty in the representation of prominent individuals and families in connection with the restructuring of their real estate and other assets to facilitate generational transition in their ownership and/or resolve disputes arising in connection with the management, disposition and inheritance of such assets. Key representations over the past year include:

• Vornado Realty Trust in its approximately US$ 2 billion acquisition of all shares of a group of foreign companies that own, through U.S. entities, a 70% controlling interest in the partnerships that control the 2 million square foot 1290 Avenue of the Americas in New York City and 555 California Street, the 1.8 million square foot Bank of America Tower in San Francisco. S&C is also advising Vornado in the development of Pennsylvania Station, the Madison Square Garden site and related areas in the 34th Street corridor in midtown Manhattan.

• Whitehall Street Global Real Estate Limited Partnership in the US$ 3.8 billion joint venture acquisition of Kerzner International Limited in partnership with Istithmar PJSC, Colony Capital, LLC, Providence Equity Partners Inc. and The Related Companies; in its acquisition of a 51% stake in a ¿4.2 billion KarstadtQuelle department store portfolio in Germany; and in approximately US$ 4 billion of hotel purchase, sale and financing transactions.

• Health Care Property Investors in its US$ 5.3 billion acquisition of CNL Retirement Properties, the single largest transaction ever in the healthcare REIT sector.

• Morgans Hotel Group in its SEC-registered IPO and NASDAQ listing including both primary and secondary shares.

• The Mara and Tisch families, owners of the New York Giants National Football League franchise, in connection with their US$ 1.6 billion joint venture development of a new professional football stadium in the Meadowlands Sports Complex together with the Johnson family, the owners of the New York Jets National Football League franchise. The new stadium represents the first time that a new NFL stadium will be constructed to serve as the home field for two competing NFL teams. The new stadium is the first 100% privately financed stadium of its size and scope, and employs an innovative financing structure that allowed each of the Giants-related owners and Jets-related owners to conduct independent financings even though the underlying stadium collateral is shared.

The Group comprises more than 35 lawyers, including six partners in the Firm's New York office, one partner in the Firm's London office, who is primarily responsible for the Group's European real estate practice, and lawyers located in the Firm's Tokyo, Hong Kong and Los Angeles offices who regularly engage in real estate transactions.

Sullivan & Cromwell's Real Estate Group and its lawyers are widely regarded as leaders in the field and consistently recognized in guides to the legal profession, including Chambers and Partners' benchmark guides, the IFLR 1000, The US Legal 500, PLC Cross-border Corporate Real Estate and PLC Which Lawyer? Yearbook, Guide to the World's Leading Real Estate Lawyers, The International Who's Who of Real Estate Lawyers, The Best Lawyers in America, Lawdragon and New York Super Lawyers.

Practice Contacts

Joseph C. Shenker
New York
P +1-212-558-3768
F +1-212-558-3588
shenkerj@sullcrom.com