Commercial Real Estate

At HunterMaclean, our Commercial Real Estate Practice Group offers comprehensive legal and business counsel on a wide range of real estate matters. Our team of attorneys use innovative and resourceful ideas to help clients structure and document transactions to match their business plans. We work closely with all facets of commercial projects, including acquisition, land use and zoning, environmental review and permitting, capitalization, financing, development, construction, leasing and resale.

Our real estate attorneys have extensive experience handling a wide variety of commercial transactions and working with owners and developers of shopping centers, mixed use projects, hotels, apartments, office buildings, industrial and business parks, affordable housing projects, educational facilities and timberland. By working in conjunction with attorneys in other practice areas, our Commercial Real Estate Practice Group also regularly advises clients on corporate, tax, bond financing, bankruptcy, employment and ERISA issues. 

Representative Engagements 

• Representing the Westin Savannah Harbor Resort and the Savannah International Trade and Convention Center on Hutchinson Island, just across from historic downtown Savannah. Over a 12-year period, we handled land acquisition, environmental permitting, zoning and land use issues, governmental relations including the annexation of the property into the City of Savannah, negotiation of a contract with the City which enabled irrigation of the golf course on the island with treated effluent, and formation of a public-private partnership which developed the infrastructure for the island, resulting in a combined investment of over $200 million.
• Representing Fort Howard Corporation in locating and constructing a $750 million recycled tissue mill in Effingham County, Georgia. We handled land assembly of over thirty separate parcels, governmental relations, local property tax and land use issues, and negotiations with state agencies concerning road construction and environmental permitting.
• Representing the owners of Oglethorpe Mall, the largest regional shopping center in South Georgia, in acquiring a substantial number of surrounding properties, and in planning and implementing several major expansions of the mall in a built-up urban environment.
• Representing the Savannah Economic Development Authority as its special environmental counsel in obtaining a first-of-its-kind wetland permit pursuant to Section 404 of the Clean Water Act which led to the pre-permitting of the wetland development within Crossroads Business Center, a 1,750-acre mixed-use industrial park.
• Representing numerous shopping center owners and their operators and real estate brokers in acquiring properties, developing the sites, obtaining governmental permitting, and in leasing and management of the properties.
• Representing developers and lenders in the financing of commercial real estate projects. Also successfully appealing increases in the tax assessments of numerous commercial properties.