Biography
Michele Maresca handles the full range of commercial real estate transactions, including representation of borrowers and lenders in financings, dispositions, acquisitions, and development agreements. She routinely represents developers, businesses, non-profit organizations, municipalities, and housing authorities. Michele’s practice and professional outlook are broadly-based rather than compartmentalized, reflecting her interest and skill in bringing together multiple parties and working to find the best ways to synthesize their mutual objectives. Throughout her varied and multi-layered practice, Michele leverages her training and experience as a land use planner to assist clients in structuring agreements to address their unique development, title, and land use issues. In addition to her law degree, she has a master’s degree in Natural Resource Planning, which allows her to engage with development projects with that valuable perspective. She is a member of the firm’s Real Estate + Development Group.
Development and Reciprocal Easement Agreements
Michele structures and negotiates complex development agreements and ground leases, including those involving public-private partnerships. She is keenly interested in working with developers on projects that focus on the “creation of place” – a holistic approach to community development that emphasizes experiential opportunity and possibility. With more than ten years of experience, Michele has handled numerous high-profile projects, including representing the Town of West Hartford in negotiating and drafting the ground lease and development agreement for the construction and disposition of a hotel in Blue Back Square. Her most recent work includes a project that involved a public-private partnership, multiple funders and ground leasing, bringing together several of her areas of interest and skillful experience. She also recently completed the public/private development of a new Town Hall, successfully navigating the often complex side of municipal development.
Michele has handled long-term ground leases for new development and obtained permits for developers of large-scale projects. She recently represented a national retailer in a complex negotiation of a reciprocal agreement among multiple landowners for shared rights and responsibilities of access, utilities and drainage.
Real Estate – Financing and Transactions
Michele has more than a decade of experience helping clients with their real estate transactions, negotiating, documenting, and closing complex real estate deals, including acquisitions, dispositions, and financings. She routinely counsels clients in the structuring, negotiation, and documentation of mortgage loans and real estate transactions; conducts due diligence; and handles all matters related to title.
Her recent transactions include representing a large real estate development firm in the refinancing of its construction and permanent loans for a high-profile downtown Hartford commercial development project. She recently assisted a real estate investment management company in its purchase of a hotel and office building through auction and also handled the sale of a former industrial site for a chemical company, including assisting the client with all related due diligence.
Michele has an extensive background in the land use field. Prior to law school, she worked for more than four years as a land use planner with a regional agency in northwest Vermont, where she was responsible for delivering technically sophisticated planning projects, including a regional build-out analysis and a regional landscape suitability analysis. While in law school, she served as a research assistant for the Vermont Law School Land Use Institute, providing support to a statewide land use planning initiative.
Michele was selected to the Connecticut Super Lawyers for 2018 and named a Rising Star in the Connecticut Super Lawyers list from 2013 to 2018. She is the Co-Chair of the International Council of Shopping Centers Connecticut P3 Committee. Michele also is active in the community, serving on West Hartford’s local planning and inland wetlands boards as well as the Board of Directors of the Aurora Foundation for Women and Girls, which works to improve the lives of women and girls in the Greater Hartford area.