Sullivan & Cromwell’s Real Estate Group occupies a unique leadership position in global commercial real estate transactions and restructurings. As an industry-based group, our real estate attorneys utilize a multi-disciplinary approach to offer clients expertise in joint ventures, acquisitions and dispositions, financings and capital markets issuances, bankruptcy and creditors’ rights, and complex restructurings of family-owned businesses and assets. Despite the challenging credit markets, our Real Estate Group has been able to leverage its deep and broad-based expertise to assist its clients in accessing non-traditional markets for real estate financings, as well as in complex restructurings, recapitalizations and opportunistic investments in, and sales of, debt and equity instruments related to the real estate industry. The Group also continued to enhance its long-standing expertise in the structuring and formation of new private equity funds to invest in real estate related assets.
Notable representations include:
- AIG in its sale of approximately $40 billion face amount RMBS to an entity owned and financed by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
- Goldman Sachs in the formation of a $2.1 billion fund that will invest in real estate assets outside of the United States and a $2.6 billion fund that will make mezzanine loan investments.
- Numerous borrowers and lenders in connection with distressed debt situations, including two of the four mezzanine lenders in the Station Casinos restructuring, Apollo in connection with several situations in which it holds debt positions, Dubai World in connection with its interests in MGM City Center, and Eton Park with respect to certain of its investments.
- A majority of the Pritzker family beneficiaries in connection with the $950 million initial public offering of Hyatt Hotels Corporation.
- Songbird Estates plc (the parent company of Canary Wharf Group) in its approximately £1 billion debt and equity recapitalization.
- Toys “R” Us in an approximately $1 billion high-yield financing, American Casino & Entertainment Properties in a high-yield bond offering, and numerous TALF-related financings, in each case as an alternative to traditional CMBS financing in light of the challenging climate for such financings.
- Vornado Realty Trust and Crescent Real Estate in connection with the sale of their respective interests in AmeriCold Realty Trust (the owner and operator of cold storage facilities) to funds affiliated with the Yucaipa Group.
- Whitehall Street Limited Partnership in its $1.2 billion acquisition of American Casino & Entertainment Properties, the owner of the Stratosphere Casino in Nevada.
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.
Our 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 IFLR1000, 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.