Partner & Head of Real Estate, Hale & Mercer LLP · 1,000+ closings · Still walks every site
Chicago · Hale & Mercer LLP · 911+ connections
I lead the real estate practice at Hale & Mercer: commercial and residential transactions, leasing, development, and the title problems nobody saw coming. I have closed more than a thousand property transactions and I still walk every site, because a plat is a drawing and the land is the fact.
I grew up on a dairy farm outside Stillwater, Minnesota. My family lost sixty acres in a boundary dispute when I was fourteen because nobody had read the 1920s plat correctly. I have been reading plats carefully ever since.
Driftless streams, 1908 window sashes, and twenty Birkebeiners.
Walked a 14-acre industrial parcel on the southwest side this morning before reading the survey. Found a drainage easement the survey shows and a neighbour's fence the survey does not. Both matter. Only one was on paper.
A title problem is a story somebody stopped writing down. The 1962 house with no deed after a 1991 death, the alley nobody vacated, the easement in a 1948 letter. The fix is almost always the same: find the person, find the paper, finish the sentence.
Twelve years since the Pilsen health-centre assembly closed its forty-first parcel. The holdout owner who nearly stopped it volunteers there on Tuesdays. Land deals are about people. It just takes longer to see.
My mother was patient number 9 at that centre. Thank you, Thomas.
Commercial and residential transactions, leasing, development, title. The 2014 Pilsen health-centre assembly: eleven parcels, forty-one closings.
Agricultural land, then commercial. Learned to walk the site before reading the survey.
Youngest of five. Sixty acres lost to a plat nobody read. Formative.
Marquette University Law School, J.D., 1999
University of Wisconsin–Madison, B.S. Agricultural Economics, 1993
The fence is always the case.