Real Estate Sector
Commercial and residential real estate has a special role to play in every aspect of life and business – whether as an investment, as loan collateral, for personal or business use, or as public space. Real estate affects everyone, whether private individuals, domestic or international companies, banks, financial service providers, pension funds, or the public sector. Property can be not just a home, but an investment and a nest egg for retirement. Besides serving as loan collateral, it also plays an important role in historic preservation and tourism. Millions of tourists visit monuments like Cologne Cathedral, Neuschwanstein Castle and the Reichstag. In other words, real estate is an important sector of the economy, tying up large amounts of capital.
Planning, building, managing and marketing real estate is a complicated task that takes special expertise. Many of our advisors on the RSM Ebner Stolz real estate team originally worked for real estate companies or real estate investors, and can draw on that experience. Which means we can help clients from the real estate industry, investors, and providers of financing succeed in every phase of the real estate value chain.
RSM Ebner Stolz has advised or is currently advising sellers, buyers, owners and users of all forms of real estate nationwide – including residential properties, office and commercial properties, hotel properties, retail properties and shopping centers. Our clients in the real estate business are institutional investors, private investors and family offices, banks, asset managers and project developers.
Our nationwide expertise is pooled by way of our real estate center of competence, which also provides quality assurance. It includes representatives from all four of our specialties. So we can cover the full range of real estate consulting from a single source.
We offer cross-border real estate expertise through our international network. Here we’ve been one of the founders of the worldwide Real Estate Special Interest Group, which we also chair.
Our team includes experts from all four of our disciplines – which means we can cover every aspect of the real estate industry in-house.
Our services at a glance
- Legal structuring of sale, investment and acquisition processes
- Founding special-purpose vehicles and acquisition vehicles
- Legal due diligence
- Drafting and negotiating real estate contracts, including
- Property and inheritable building rights agreements (asset deals)
- Share purchase agreements (share deals)
- Joint venture agreements and other organizational agreements
- Corporate and asset succession agreements
- Financing and collateral agreements
- Leases
- Asset, property and facility management agreements
- Prime-contractor and general-contractor agreements
- Agreements between neighbors
- Consulting on construction and planning law for real estate projects
- IPO consulting, design of REITs
- Tax structuring of real estate transactions (sales, investments and acquisitions)
- Tax clauses for asset deals or share deals, including inheritable building rights and financing agreements
- Tax due diligence
- Tax optimization of investment structures of all kinds (at the corporate and single-property level), in all legal forms, particularly direct investments, fund structuring (closed-end and open-end funds, special funds), debt and equity investments
- Tax optimization of real estate holdings and process implementation
- Ongoing tax advice on all matters of day-to-day business operations
- Advising on defending against problems and asserting rights, including assistance with tax audits and with appeals, lawsuits and actions to protect rights both in and out of court (tax courts of the federal states, the Federal Tax Court, the General Court of the European Union and the European Court of Justice)
- Specialized advice on value added tax, especially risk assessments and documentation under Sec. 15a of the Value Added Tax Act
- Advising on structures for land transfer tax
- Tax advice on succession, including inheritance and gift tax
- Voluntarily coming forward in matters of tax under-declaration
- Annual tax returns (including annual financial statements and tax balance sheets) for all kinds of taxes, and advance payments (value added tax, employee withholding tax)
- Financial and payroll accounting for taxes, including preparing payment traffic
- Tax optimization of investment structures (at the corporate and single-property level)
- Accounting, preparation of annual financial statements and tax returns
- Advising on land transfer tax and property tax
- Single-entity and consolidated annual financial statements (German Commercial Code, IFRS)
- Financial due diligence
- Determining purchase price (closing balance sheet, closing accounts) and purchase price allocations
- Reconciliation calculations and conversions between reporting formats
- Internal auditing
- Consulting on internal control systems
- IT consulting
- Risk management
- Corporate and real estate appraisals
- Audits under the Regulations for Brokers and Developers
- IPO consulting
- Pro forma financial information
- Restructuring concepts and reorganization appraisals under standard IDW S 6 (new version)
- Restructuring for portfolio optimization (rents, costs, investments, divestments, processes)
- Assistance with implementing planned restructuring
- Real estate portfolio analyses, portfolio structuring
- Financial and commercial due diligence
- Preparation and review of business plans
- Financial modeling
- Value-oriented management and controlling concepts
- Restructuring real estate financing and consulting on NPL transactions
- Exploration and assessment of options for financing in a crisis