Real Estate

Overview

Real Estate is the oldest practice at the firm. Founding partner Edwin Birch opened the group in 1974 and still advises, from an Of Counsel role, on large-tract matters along the Connecticut shoreline and the Farmington Valley. The group today is led by Wallace Blackwood, a past chair of the Connecticut Bar Association's Real Property Section, and closes more than 125 commercial transactions a year.

Commercial development work is the largest share of the docket — raw-land acquisitions, zoning and special-permit proceedings, subdivision approvals, wetlands applications under the Connecticut Inland Wetlands and Watercourses Act, and vertical construction. We walk clients through local zoning commission hearings with the same preparation we bring to federal court. Knowing who sits on which commission in which town matters, and our team has been showing up at those hearings for decades.

Mixed-use and adaptive-reuse projects have become a growing piece of the practice, driven in part by Connecticut's incentive programs for housing and by municipal transit-oriented development around CTrail stations. We have closed adaptive-reuse conversions in downtown Hartford, New Haven, Stamford, and several smaller Connecticut cities, coordinating historic-preservation credits, brownfields grants through DECD, and private construction financing.

Waterfront and coastal land-use matters are a Blackwood and Birch specialty. Coastal Area Management Act (CAM) applications, DEEP Office of Long Island Sound Programs permits, riparian rights disputes, and pier-and-dock approvals have been a steady part of the practice for forty years. The group handles the appellate work that sometimes follows — most recently, a CT Appellate Court brief defending a coastal-zone subdivision approval.

Commercial leasing is handled under Whitney Chen, a Senior Associate who previously served as in-house counsel to a national retail developer. Her docket includes anchor-tenant leases for regional shopping centers, office tenancies in Hartford and Stamford, and build-to-suit industrial leases. Brock Harrison, a UConn-trained geologist, handles natural-resources permitting and environmental due diligence — a niche that has proven valuable for manufacturing clients acquiring legacy industrial sites and for the firm's quarry and aggregates clients.

We do not chase national law-firm real estate work. The clients who call us are developers, closely-held property owners, family offices, and operating companies that need real estate counsel tied into Connecticut's municipal and regulatory architecture. That is where we are useful.