Lending and Financing

Orrick’s Real Estate Group has broad experience in representing domestic and foreign banks, insurance companies, finance companies, leasing companies, public and private pension funds and other financial institutions and institutional investors in a financing transactions. These include structured finance/securitization and conduit transactions and construction, bridge, mezzanine and permanent loans. Our lawyers have been responsible for the financing of office buildings, shopping centers, hotels, and other commercial, industrial, residential, and mixed-use developments, using such finance structures as term loans, hybrid-debt devices such as participating and convertible mortgages, letters of credit and credit enhancement devices, synthetic leases, residual value insurance, loans incorporating interest rate swaps, caps, collars and other hedging products, revolving credit agreements, loan syndications, sales of participation interests, intercreditor and co-lender agreements, warehouse loans, and other creative financing techniques.

The lawyers in Orrick’s Real Estate Group are also nationally known in the field of joint venture financing of large-scale real estate projects. The Real Estate Group, working closely with the Tax Department, provides the creative lawyering needed to solve the complex partnership and tax issues involved in joint venture transactions and to create practical structures to meet our clients’ goals and objectives.

Another field in which the Real Estate Group has particular expertise is representing borrowers and lenders in commercial mortgage-backed securities and in originating loans used in various conduit vehicles. Orrick’s position as one of the leading securitization and structured finance firms in the United States, combined with the Real Estate Group’s hands-on real estate transactional experience, enables us to understand the particular requirements of CMBS and conduit products from the perspective of the borrowers, lenders, underwriters, and issuers.

The Real Estate Group also works closely with Orrick’s Public Finance Department on a variety of infrastructure financing techniques that primarily use land-secured revenues to pay for public improvements. These include assessment districts, bonds, leases, certificates of participation, and credit enhancement devices.

Our active representation of REITs and other public real estate operating companies has led to our involvement in the full-range of corporate finance and debt market devices used in the capital markets today. Combined with our experience representing lender clients on loans to REITs and real estate operating companies, our company representation has uniquely qualified us to advise clients on either side of such financings.

The following are representative real estate financing clients: