Real Estate

Orrick’s Real Estate Group represents clients that are active throughout the world in all phases of real estate investment, financing, development, and operations. The work of our real estate lawyers ranges from traditional purchases, sales, leases and financings to highly sophisticated and complex portfolio acquisitions and multi-jurisdictional transactions. We have significant experience and expertise in virtually every area of real estate law, which has enabled us to meet the full range of our clients’ needs and to create innovative solutions and new opportunities for our clients.

The sophistication and diversity of the Real Estate Group’s practice is exemplified by the representative transactions and clients identified below. For example, in real estate financing, Orrick advises numerous domestic and international banks, life insurance companies, non-bank financial institutions and other financing sources on traditional mortgage lending activities, as well as on a variety of creative financing devices. In addition, as the real estate industry has increasingly become an integral part of the national capital markets, Orrick has become one of the leading firms in the representation of public and private REITs and parties involved in mortgage-backed security transactions and other real estate structured finance transactions. In the field of real estate investments, Orrick is one of the preeminent firms representing pension funds, pension fund advisors, insurance companies, and other institutional investors.

Orrick’s Real Estate Group and the firm’s business and tax lawyers also have extensive experience representing non-U.S. investors and lending institutions making investments and loans throughout the world. The group has been heavily involved with foreign investment in United States real estate, beginning with investors from Europe, Canada, and the Middle East in the 1970s, and continuing with investment activity from the Far East and South America in the 1980s and the 1990s. Most recently, the group has been active representing U.S. investors in Europe and U.S. and European investors in Asia. An example of our strength in international transactions is Orrick’s role as a leading provider of real estate services to U.S. and European firms investing in Japan. In addition, Orrick’s real estate lawyers in Paris and Milan advise clients on major transactions in France, Italy and throughout Europe. Separate descriptions of our practices in the Tokyo, Paris and Milan offices are available upon request.

The Orrick Difference

We take special pride in knowing and understanding our clients’ businesses and their transaction objectives and goals. As a result, we bring a solution-oriented practical approach to our work and an ability to provide business counseling on transactions that adds value beyond the negotiating and drafting skills that are normally a lawyer’s primary responsibility. In addition, these features also distinguish Orrick’s real estate practice from other law firms:

• Orrick’s Real Estate Group delivers a combination of expertise, experience, overall resources and staffing to undertake and expeditiously complete real estate transactions of any size or complexity, in any location and on whatever schedule is required. We have a proven ability to handle transactions on a national and international basis, using, when appropriate, the firm’s locations in major financial and political centers and an established network of local counsel to assist as needed on transactions in any state in the country.
• Orrick’s Real Estate Group has a preeminent national reputation as real estate lawyers, with many of our lawyers nationally known as writers, speakers, and panelists on real estate law and real estate industry issues and actively involved in key industry associations and organizations.
• Orrick has one of the leading securitization and structured finance firms in the United States, offering all of the skills, services, and investment banking relationships needed to handle the full range of rated and non-rated real estate securitization projects. This expertise is integrated with the Real Estate Group and is readily available to the firm’s real estate clients.
• Orrick’s Tax Department, in addition to the usual range of tax planning services for real estate clients, has years of experience in creating and refining novel techniques for financing, securitizing, and investing in real estate assets, thus providing unique tax law resources for structuring transactions for real estate clients.
• Orrick has the premier public finance practice in the United States, with unmatched expertise and experience with every type of bond, assessment and financing technique used to finance public improvements. This provides an additional dimension to the services provided to the Real Estate Group’s clients.
• Orrick’s full-service law firm capabilities permit the Real Estate Group to call on a complete range of experience and expertise required in all other areas of the law of concern to real estate clients, including corporate finance and securities law, bankruptcy and insolvency law, environmental law, and employment law.