Why Spruce Law’s Corporate Real Estate Strategies Practice (CRES):
You have or will soon have greater than 20 leased or owned locations, or you own at least 3 commercial or multi-tenant properties (e.g. shopping centers, office buildings, or industrial portfolios).
You need experienced counsel to quarterback for your company’s real estate deals or portfolio.
For corporate clients, real estate is not “core” to your business (“it’s not what you do”), but real estate spend is a growing component of your P&L.
You are under-resourced internally and want to efficiently outsource the steady flow of real estate documents (leases, agreements of sale, assignments, estoppels, SNDAs, subleases, etc.).
You have been burned in the past by poorly negotiated leases (no expansion, termination and/or assignment rights, unanticipated repair costs, etc.).
Your traditional outsourced counsel has been inconsistent, expensive, slow, and is too often staffed by inexperienced associate attorneys who don’t know how to get deals done efficiently.
Legal fees for real estate contracts have blown your legal budget.
It currently takes too long to get from LOI to a signed lease/agreement of sale.
You have experienced costly turnover trying to staff real estate contracts internally.
Program Benefits (“How We Do It”)
We customize our implementation process for each client and routinely utilize fixed fee and other alternative billing arrangements. Our collective 50+ years of experience managing the legal aspects of large corporate real estate portfolios informs our proven process, which includes:
- Step 1 (Form Language Leasing Playbook): We interview company stakeholders to develop a customized policy and form language directory for your real estate deals that catalog the key issues about which you care most. We also develop pre-approved “fallback” positions to drive consistency and efficiency with each deal.
- Step 2 (Broker Playbook Development): We identify the hard issues that tend to frustrate document negotiations and arm your brokers with a “must have” checklist that is given to counterparties before a deal goes to LOI. This cuts down time and expense on the backend.
- Step 3 (Deal Flow Management): Your deals are docketed in our deal tracker and a full-time corporate real estate paralegal manages “document-turn” deadlines and “prods” deal participants for deliverables that are stuck in one party’s side of the court for too long. This shortens the timeline between LOI and final executed documents, getting your locations up and running faster.
- Step 4 (Budgeting): Once we are up and running on your deals, we implement cost-saving measures and help budget your real estate legal spend going forward.
“The team at Spruce streamlined our real estate process top-to-bottom.”
George Council, VP, Strategic Sourcing and Real Estate Management, EmployBridge