Lanneau Wm. Lambert, Jr.
Lanny Lambert joined Turner Padget in 1986, after serving as in-house counsel with a real estate development and mortgage banking company. Today, Lanny combines his in-house experience with the skills he has developed in his 25-plus years of private practice to serve clients on many types of commercial real estate and other business matters. He represents municipalities, lenders, developers, investors, buyers and sellers, advising on financing, leasing, land development, construction, zoning and regulatory matters, real estate title insurance, and all aspects of structuring commercial loans and business transactions. He also focuses on the formation of business entities, economic development incentives, business mergers and acquisitions, and general business counseling.
In addition, Lanny has significant experience in lender counsel representation in complex real estate and asset-based financing and in all aspects of commercial real estate development, leasing and financing. He works regularly with municipalities on various business, real estate and financial matters. Lanny served on the firm’s Management Committee from 1997 to 1999 and Executive Committee from 2009 to 2011, and he was the managing shareholder and president of Turner Padget from 2000 until 2008. He now serves as the firm’s group leader for its business transactions practice. A firm believer in strong commitment to the community and his profession, Lanny is a leader and active member of organizations related to both the business of law and the practice of law, his clients’ industries, and South Carolina economic development. He has served on the boards of various philanthropic organizations, and he and his family have been active in the public school system.
Lanny is a native South Carolinian, who returned to the state to attend law school. He has called Columbia home for 35 years.
Representative Matters
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Directed the closing of two loans totaling over $30 million for a major wholesale distributor of building materials and construction products. The first loan was a $15 million operating line of credit secured by over 34,000 acres of timberland located in eleven counties in South Carolina and three counties in North Carolina. The majority of the land had been owned by the company for decades without ever having been offered as collateral for a loan, which required a massive amount of title abstracting and review. The second loan was actually two separate loans totaling roughly $17 million, one of which qualified for the federal New Markets Tax Credit Program. Six different law firms from across the country were involved in this loan with Lanny serving as the lead counsel for the borrower team. Regular and open communication and collaboration with lender’s counsel, lender and borrower’s respective tax counsel, and the lender and borrower’s respective business teams was crucial to ensure that the requirements for the New Markets Tax Credit Program were met.
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Over an eighteen month period, Lanny served as special South Carolina counsel in various financing transactions for a Charlotte-based REIT primarily holding MOBs in hospital campuses across the country. The loans ranged from $9 million to $200 million and involved properties in multiple states. As South Carolina counsel, Lanny worked closely with out-of-state counsel to tailor the loan closing procedures in order to satisfy the South Carolina Supreme Court's attorney supervision requirements for loans secured by South Carolina real estate.
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Represents a real estate development company specializing in building and leasing retail space for regional and national tenants. Lanny handled the permanent financing to replace the construction loan for an in-fill retail shopping project built in downtown Columbia containing a drugstore, a restaurant and two other retail spaces. The permanent loan was only to be secured by the portion of the shopping center containing the drugstore and required dividing the as-built property into two separate parcels. Lanny worked with engineers and City of Columbia officials to redraw the property lines in a way that satisfied the lender's requirements, the city's zoning and parking requirements, and addressed the tenant's concerns with restructuring the property and the drugstore lease.
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Counseled a federal credit union through a commercial loan for the construction of a $7.5 million classroom building project for a university foundation. Neither the lender nor borrower was familiar with the intricacies of due diligence issues related to construction on a college campus including property subdivision and special governmental contract procurement challenges.
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Served as special counsel to a national lender that was providing $7.5 million in financing necessary to support a manufacturer exiting from bankruptcy and to supply funding for ongoing working capital needs. The South Carolina collateral included a manufacturing plant that required negotiation and documentation in order to allow subordinate financing with two governmental lenders remain in place. Addressing the issues related to the South Carolina subordinate loan was a threshold component to the closing of the loan facilities.
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Assisted a real estate developer with structuring the acquisition of several real estate tracts that were under contract with a national homebuilder for the development of a residential subdivision. The transaction included the closing of the acquisition financing and negotiating the assignment of the subdivision development agreement and implementing the homebuilder’s special requirements to provide property development financing and the payment of that financing with credits when individual lots are acquired by the homebuilder.
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With a short timeframe to close prior to the end of the year, a real estate developer sought Lanny’s assistance to wind down one development business entity while structuring the purchase of a discounted mortgage loan from a construction lender of a partially developed residential subdivision and the ultimate acquisition of that subdivision by one of the developer’s other companies. The transaction involved negotiating the exit of a business partner, structuring the consolidation of existing loans and the acquisition loan to fund the note purchase, and the resolution of title issues so that subdivision development could continue.
- Is licensed as a real estate title insurance agent.