Sanford C. Presant

Sanford C. Presant, Chair of the firm's Real Estate Fund Practice, focuses his practice on providing fund and joint venture best practice business and tax structuring advice to sponsors of the leading real estate private equity funds, REITs, and their local partners and investors in the U.S. and internationally.

Sandy has more than 30 years of experience as a tax and business lawyer for major funds and real estate companies. He has structured and negotiated the tax and business aspects for over 100 real estate funds (including their internal general partner structuring and executive compensation) in the U.S., Europe, Latin America and Asia, and more than 500 joint ventures (partnerships and LLCs) as both a corporate and tax attorney. Sandy is a well-known author and frequent lecturer on these topics as well. Sandy was the National Co Chair - Real Estate Fund Services at Ernst & Young from 2000 - 2005 and was Chair of DLA Piper’s Real Estate Fund Practice.

Sandy served as National Chairman of the American Bar Association's Committee on Partnership Taxation, is a member of the ABA Task Force on Debt Restructurings and Bankruptcy, and chaired the ABA Task Forces on Publicly Traded Partnerships and Partnership Tax Allocation Rulings. He is on the Tax Policy Steering Committee of the State Bar of California, on the advisory board for California CEB's Advanced Tax Planning for Real Estate Transactions, on the Board of Advisors of the Loyola Law School Tax LL.M. Program, and is a member of the Advisory Board for CCH's Journal of Passthrough Entities. He has been a regular guest commentator on the PBS program The Nightly Business Report and was a presenter at the 1993 California Economic Summit. For 15 years, Sandy was an adjunct professor at New York University's Real Estate Institute. He speaks annually at a number of the principal tax conferences throughout the country.

Sandy was a program director of the 2003 NAREIT Law and Accounting Conference. He currently is a Co-Chair (and founder) of PLI's Annual Real Estate Tax Forum in New York. He is the co-author of the two-volume treatise Tax Aspects of Real Estate Investments. In 2007, he was named a California Super Lawyer, as the result of a joint research project by Law & Politics and Los Angeles magazines. He is listed in The Best Lawyers in America.

Sandy has substantial experience in structuring funds and joint ventures to minimize UBTI, including the use of blocker structures reducing the withholding and tax for cross border investors and tax-exempts, public and private REITs, hotel net lease structures that minimize leakage, and fractions rule compliant structures.