Andrew Charles

Andy acts as counsel to several institutional equity investors entering into joint ventures with both national and regional sponsors across a variety of real estate asset classes. His notable work includes structuring programmatic joint ventures for Berkshire Realty Ventures, Broadview Real Estate Partners and Mitsui Fudosan America Inc. in sectors such as student housing, senior living, hospitality, manufactured housing and industrial/last mile; structuring and negotiating preferred equity investment vehicles for clients such as Mitsui Fudosan America, Fortress Investment Group and BayNorth Capital; and advising on strategic joint ventures for institutional investors such as American Real Estate Partners, New Valley Realty, O’Connor Capital Partners, Deka Immobilien and Arch Street Capital.

In his role as primary outside counsel for Mitsui, the U.S. subsidiary of Mitsui Fudosan Co. Ltd., Japan’s largest real estate company with approximately $70 billion in assets, Andy has guided the company through dozens of ventures in office, industrial and multifamily projects located throughout the United States. Most notably, he represented Mitsui in joint venture agreements with the Related Companies and Oxford Properties Group for the acquisition and development of 50 Hudson Yards, the global headquarters of BlackRock, and 55 Hudson Yards, for which Mitsui’s aggregate equity investment exceeded 90% of the necessary capital. Following the success of the Hudson Yards joint ventures, Andy represented Mitsui in subsequent transactions with Related, including projects as diverse as the Cortland, a luxury residential condominium project in West Chelsea, New York, and Innovation Square II, a 265,000-square-foot life sciences/laboratory building located in Boston’s Seaport District that is fully leased to Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

Andy also advised Mitsui on a joint venture with Tishman Speyer Properties, initially for the construction and development of Brannan Square, a commercial complex consisting of three office buildings aggregating 1.03 million square feet of floor space located in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco. Based on the success of that joint venture, he represented Mitsui in subsequent joint ventures with Tishman Speyer, including with Tishman Speyer and the San Francisco Giants to develop a mixed-use development consisting of 540 residential units, 634,000 square feet of office space and 104,000 square feet of retail space located in the Mission Bay neighborhood of San Francisco, and with Breakthrough Properties (a joint venture between Tishman Speyer and Belco Capital), a global life sciences real estate developer, to develop Torrey View, a 520,000-square-foot research and development campus located on 10 acres in San Diego. In 2023, Andy helped Mitsui expand its partnership with Tishman Speyer, advising on and structuring the companies’ first programmatic joint venture through which Mitsui committed $500,000 to the acquisition, development and operation of industrial properties in leading U.S. cities.