Joshua Stein, a member of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers, the American College of Mortgage Attorneys, and the Anglo American Real Property Institute, has wide experience in commercial real estate transactions, development transactions, new and defaults loans, and other real estate matters and disputes. He has handled closings and resolved problems for ground leases, hotels, developments, and space leases. He has represented secured lenders, purchasers, sellers, investors, developers, borrowers, landlords, tenants, leasehold mortgagees, and hotel operators.
Joshua has been engaged as an expert witness, an arbitrator, a mediator, and a court-appointed receiver and referee. His name appears on the New York State Unified Court System Part 36 Fiduciary List for those and other appointments. He is a former chair of the New York State Bar Association’s Real Property Law Section, as well as a former co-chair of the Section’s Commercial Leasing Committee. Since 1997, Joshua has chaired Practising Law Institute’s annual two-day seminar on commercial real estate finance. He speaks regularly before real estate industry and legal audiences and is often quoted in the real estate and business press, but never about his own transactions.
He has published five books: Stein on New York Commercial Mortgage Transactions (LexisNexis 2006); A Practical Guide to Real Estate Practice (ALI-CLE 2001); Lender’s Guide to Structuring and Closing Commercial Mortgage Loans (Mortgage Bankers Association 2004; out of print); A Guide to Ground Leases (With Forms and Checklists) (ALI-ABA 2005; out of print); and A Guide to Troubled Commercial Real Estate Loans for Lenders and Borrowers (LexisNexis 2010). He edited and wrote much of the New York State Bar Association’s two-volume treatise on Commercial Leasing (in its third edition as of 2017) and has published more than 200 articles, checklists, and other materials on commercial real estate law and practice. An article he wrote on usury won a 2002 Burton Award recognizing clarity and simplicity in legal writing. He is one of the leading writers on commercial real estate law and practice in the United States.
His name appears regularly in guides to leading real estate lawyers, such as those published under various and sometimes changing names by Chambers, Euromoney Legal Media Group, Law Business Research, U.S. News & World Report, and others.
in 2017, he was recognized by Who’s Who Legal as a “Thought Leader,” one of eleven “truly outstanding practitioners” of real estate law in North America—the only member of that group not in a large firm. For 2018, Who’s Who Legal named him one of 19 “Thought Leaders” on a worldwide basis, again the only one not in a large firm. Super Lawyers regularly recognizes him as one of the top 100 (and sometimes top 10) attorneys in the New York City region, across all practice areas. Chambers USA has repeatedly identified him as a leading NYC real estate attorney—again the only one not part of a large firm.
Before Joshua formed Joshua Stein PLLC, he was a partner for over 20 years with one of the top 10 law firms in the world, preceded by three years at least of two other law firms. Except in his first year of practice, his legal work has related almost entirely to commercial real estate, supplemented by a small amount of intellectual property work.
Joshua obtained his law degree from Columbia Law School, where he was a managing editor of the Columbia Law Review and a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. He obtained his undergraduate degree from University of California, Berkeley (highest honors, Phi Beta Kappa).
Before law school, Joshua had a brief career in book publishing. In high school and college, he worked part-time for local newspapers. Highlights of his journalism career included a front-page interview with Steven Weed (Patty Hearst’s boyfriend at the time) and a front-page article about his experience working as a municipal garbage collector for a day.
He is an active member of the Board of Trustees of The Bronx Museum of the Arts and an art collector, with an emphasis on (a) paintings of buildings, particularly by artists early in their career; and (b) California landscape paintings produced by his father, Sherman Stein, a retired professor of mathematics at University of California, Davis. His mother, Hannah Stein, is a widely published poet. He has two daughters: Helaina, a U.S. foreign service officer; and Julia, who works in digital advertising. He lives on East 57th Street in Manhattan and in High Falls, New York.
Contact:
501 Madison Avenue
Suite 402
New York, NY 10022
Email: joshua@joshuastein.com
Phone: (212) 688-3300
Website: https://www.joshuastein.com/