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Jennifer H. Weiss focuses her practice on structuring, negotiating, and documenting complex tax oriented commercial transactions, primarily involving real estate, real estate securities, and capital market transactions. She represents traded REITs, public non-traded REITs and private REITs, and real estate operating companies, and is involved in most aspects of their portfolio acquisitions and dispositions, fund formations, joint ventures and strategic alliances, as well as the formation, qualification, and operation of REITs for federal income tax purposes. Jennifer also represents public, private, and institutional taxable and tax-exempt clients structuring collective investment and reinvestment vehicles, real estate securitization, equity and debt investment structuring and restructuring, work outs, and venture capital transactions on a tax-deferred basis, including all aspects of investments in pass-thru entities.

Concentrations

  • Federal taxation
  • Securitized investments in real estate and asset acquisitions and dispositions
  • REIT taxation
  • Public and private capital market transactions
  • Fund formations
  • Complex strategic alliances including joint venture, partnership, LLC and other pass-thru entity transactions
  • Venture capital transactions
  • Pension investments in real estate involving issues of unrelated business taxable income
  • Foreign investments in real estate
  • Partnership structuring and restructuring
  • Work-out and debt restructuring
  • Organization, qualification and operation of real estate of investment trusts

Capabilities

Experience

  • Involved with numerous public REIT capital market transactions.
  • Structured, negotiated and documented several private fund formations, each of which involved a public REIT subsidiary as the sponsor general partner and in excess of $200 million of institutional investor capital.
  • Structured, negotiated and documented a joint venture private REIT between a public REIT and a foreign government.
  • Structured, negotiated and documented an $80 million portfolio acquisition of real property in single asset entity Down-REIT transactions.
  • Structured and documented sophisticated long-term incentive plan for senior executives which provides tax deferral and long term capital gain treatment on value of security at time of liquidity event.

Recognition & Leadership

  • Listed, The Legal 500 United States, Real Estate - Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), 2019-2020 and 2022-2023  
  • Listed, Boston magazine, "Top Lawyers - Tax Law," 2022
  • Member, American Bar Association, Section of Taxation, Real Estate Committee, Subcommittee on Tax Exempt Entities
  • Member, Boston Bar Association
  • Member, Government Relations Committee, National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts (NAREIT)
  • Member, Massachusetts Association

Credentials

Education
  • LL.M., New York University School of Law
  • J.D., Boston University School of Law
  • A.B., Brown University
Admissions
  • Massachusetts