Real Estate Deals: Negotiating and Drafting

• Semester: Spring 2021
• Course ID: 379M
• Credit Hours: 3
• Unique: 29275

Description

This course will be taught entirely online via Zoom.  

The primary objective of this course is for students to become familiar with and understand how different legal agreements which are universal in all real estate transactions are designed to allocate legal and commercial risk among the relevant parties. In order to present these risk-allocation concepts, the instructor has written a single case study representing an amalgamation of actual commercial real estate transactions which he has been a part of as legal counsel. Additionally, this course will expose students to the numerous legal agreements and due diligence issues that real estate investors and professionals are presented with for virtually all commercial transactions and the process of getting to closing. These legal documents and the concepts that are included within them will be presented in the context of a real transaction and the class will explore why and when they are necessary, what they are intended to accomplish and what legal and risk-related commercial issues should be considered when reviewing them. The course format will be based on a single, case study  of a real estate development transaction, starting with the acquisition of raw land and ending with the sale of a “leased-up”, completed office building to a publicly-traded Real Estate Investment Trust. For each topic, we will be guided by the legal documents that our fictional developer is presented with and analyze the relevant practical and theoretical issues as if the class was dealing with these documents as part of a real-life transaction.  Through the case study and simulated negotiations, the class will have an opportunity to be exposed to and actively deal with real world issues faced by real estate lawyers.