Brent Saldaña advises investors, developers, owners and operators, and others in the real estate industry in diverse, sophisticated real estate and corporate transactions. His clients span from individual investors and family-owned real estate enterprises, to established developers, to sponsors launching real estate funds, and his experience touches on multiple asset types and classes, including multifamily, office, industrial, R&D campuses, and vineyards, among others. He serves as chair of Farella Braun + Martel’s Real Estate Group.

Brent has extensive experience in acquisitions and dispositions, construction and permanent financings, multi-tiered joint ventures and entity formations, development projects, leasing, and asset and property management arrangements. He advises clients in many unusual deals requiring creative structures, including unique land swap transactions and challenging tenant workouts. Brent also works closely with members of Farella’s Family Wealth Group in structuring real estate holdings and succession planning for families looking to preserve generational wealth.

Brent’s practice has a particular focus on complex real estate projects in the San Francisco Bay Area that require negotiating mutually beneficial solutions among multiple stakeholders to protect his clients’ interests. His work involves thoughtful consideration of interrelated agreements, excellent project management skills, and a continual appreciation of the big picture. He brings an infectious enthusiasm for placemaking, the built environment, and all things real estate.

Representative work includes:

• Representing the developer in adaptive reuse projects in the East Bay involving the exercise of purchase rights in leases with the municipality, structuring of joint ventures, obtaining construction financing, and negotiation of reciprocal utility easements with adjacent owners.
• Representing a multifamily owner and operator in the restructuring of a dozen of its limited partnerships and tenancy in common holdings along the West Coast.
• Representing the seller in the sale of a Peninsula office building re-entitled for multifamily construction. This sale, involving seven separate owners, required intricate seller financing, facilitated by the appointment of an administrative agent.
• Representing a sponsor in the formation of a single-family residential investment fund targeting assets in the Southwest.
• Representing owners and operators of collective retail experiences, including representation of a flower market operator and food hall operator.
• Advising an office/retail unit owner in the foreclosure of an assessment lien under a reciprocal easement agreement against an adjoining unit owner.
• Negotiating a $175MM credit facility, including lines of credit, secured by personal property assets for a Bay Area-based construction company.
• Advising clients on Subdivision Map Act, Tenant Protection Act, Commercial Tenant Protection Act and other California statutory law issues.
• Negotiating financing for the developer of a mixed-use project in India Basin in San Francisco.
• Assisting an East Bay developer with build-to-suit leases, including a build-to-suit lease for a 220,000-square-foot office building for a life sciences company.
• Representing winery and vineyard owners and operators in water infrastructure and water rights easements.
• Advising a senior living owner and operator in sale negotiations with a developer of an adjacent mixed-use project in San Jose in which the senior living owner obtained future easement and other rights in an intricate set of sale and easement agreements.

Prior to joining a law firm, Brent worked in development and marketing at The San Francisco Foundation and as in-house counsel for a CDFI fund (nonprofit lender) lending to businesses in New York and in disaster recovery zones.