Michele has more than a decade of experience helping clients with their real estate transactions, negotiating, documenting, and closing complex real estate deals. Her practice also reflects a keen interest in the creation of affordable housing, working collaboratively with both lenders and developers to achieve that goal. 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 of revitalizing communities.

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. 

Development + Redevelopment Projects

Michele works with clients to structure and negotiate complex development agreements, join venture agreements and ground leases, including those involving public-private partnerships, and financing documents. 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.

Real Estate – Financing + Transactions

Michele routinely counsels clients in the structuring, negotiation, and documentation of mortgage loans; conducts due diligence; and handles all matters related to title. She has extensive experience in many types of affordable housing finance transactions, including construction and permanent financing transactions, tax-exempt bond transactions and tax credit transactions.

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 is active in the community, serving on the Board of Directors of The Bridge Family Center, Inc., which helps children grow and thrive in the face of family challenges, and on the Board of Directors of Aurora Foundation for Women and Girls, which works to improve the lives of women and girls in the Greater Hartford area.