This is a story of knowing your client. Here's why.I love it when people -- usually ones not too experienced in the industry -- tell me, "Oh, leases are all pretty much the same. You have a landlord, a tenant, a building and a term. Just plug in the magic words and off you go."In a word, wrong. In fact, this is wrong on so many levels that I felt I needed to write about it.First of all, who is the tenant and what is the building? Different buildings and different tenants require completely different types of leases. Yes, some of the language can be the same but the...
A Tale of Two Loans
Today's Wall Street Journal profiled two big Larry Freed projects that have had problems discussed here before: Block 37 and the old Carson Pirie Scott building, which some people might actually call Sullivan Center. They are probably the same folks who call Sears Tower the Willis Tower.Before I go further: it isn't just the same developer we are talking about here. Both properties are in the same city, Chicago. And they are on the same street, State Street. Indeed, the two projects are what -- a whopping one block apart from each other.Bank of America, as successor to...
Reason No. 136 to Hire a Real Estate Lawyer
I honestly thought they were going to get rid of covenant fees by legislation from real estate transaction or the like. But according to this NYT story they are alive and well, at least in some jurisdictions.Yup, the developer, for the next 99 years, gets what amounts to a 1% transfer tax whenever a property is sold. The thought, I guess, is that these rights could be securitized and sold to give the developer more cash or perhaps coupons to clip down the road. And now of course people are complaining that these fees were buried deep into a declaration of covenants and taht...
Picking a real estate lawyer - bigger isn't always necessarily better
I was reading Shopping Centers Today (the ICSC's member magazine) last night and enjoyed reading the lead article, a piece on lessons learned by developers that left them wiser.But then I read one of the tales, from Bob Champion, a well-respected Southern California developer whose company rings a bell in my head, though I can't recall having done any deals with it. Champion recounted a story where he received legal advice on rehabbing a historic building. Apparently, the advice was to the effect that his project would be exempt from the Americans with Disabilities Act (and though...