Susan J. Booth is the head of the West Coast Real Estate Group of Holland & Knight. Ms. Booth counsels domestic and international commercial banks, pension funds, private equity funds and REITs on a variety of real estate matters ranging from secured lending transactions (acquisition, development, construction, revolving, permanent, mezzanine and Shari'ah compliant in both the whole-loan and CMBS contexts), co-lending and participation arrangements, intercreditor disputes, mortgage loan portfolio sales/acquisitions, post-financing asset management, workouts, deeds-in-lieu and REO management. Ms. Booth has extensive experience in negotiating, drafting and successfully closing large commercial financing transactions involving shopping centers, hotels, condominiums, office buildings, industrial parks, senior-living centers and residential, commercial and mixed-use developments. She has also devoted a substantial amount of time to assisting lenders in developing and implementing strategies to resolve the issues arising from non-performing real estate assets. Additionally, Ms. Booth has experience with commercial property purchase/sale transactions, leasing and property management.
Ms. Booth has organized, written and edited materials, and been a speaker on numerous programs (in California and nationally), on such topics as fundamentals of loan workouts, evaluating troubled real estate assets, assessing a lender's pre-foreclosure options for distressed real estate assets, understanding purchase and sale agreements, financing ground lease transactions, risks and pitfalls in hotel and condotel financing, navigating through California's anti-deficiency laws, loan workouts (before and after bankruptcy), providing a roadmap through the defeasance process, trends in debt and equity markets and the impact on a real estate lender resulting from the unenforceability of a jury trial waiver in California.