Dalila V. Best

Biography

Dalila Best concentrates her practice on representing lenders in sophisticated commercial real estate finance transactions involving multifamily and mixed use properties throughout the United States. Each transaction involves any variety of restrictive use agreements, tax abatements, ground leases, master leases, shared facility agreements, and more. Dalila has experience representing financial institutions as bridge, construction, and permanent lenders, credit enhancers, and as originators and servicers for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

Prior to joining Blank Rome, Dalila represented lenders and borrowers in matters involving ground-up construction, hotels, office buildings, and affordable housing developments.

During law school, Dalila was a member of the Charles Hamilton Houston National Moot Court Team.

Experience

Recent Transactions include:

Seller’s/Servicer’s counsel in connection with the credit enhancement of tax exempt bonds issued by a city housing agency secured by an affordable multifamily residential housing development with locations throughout Brooklyn, New York. This transaction involved multiple layers of subordinate debt, tax abatements and exemptions, housing assistance payments, rental assistance demonstration use agreements, numerous regulatory agreements and restrictive declarations, and ground leases.
Seller’s/Servicer’s counsel in connection with refinancing a conventional fixed rate loan secured by a condominium with low income housing tax credits, and inclusionary housing restrictive covenants.
Seller’s/Servicer’s counsel in a large-scale cross-collateralized portfolio transaction consisting of 24 properties across eight states.
Lender’s counsel in connection with $786 million aggregate financing consisting of 23 transactions, secured by 24 distinct student housing facilities located in 7 different states for sale to Fannie Mae (10 loans) and to Freddie Mac (13 loans). The financing was part of a much larger transaction valued at more than $12 billion, consisting of the acquisition of all outstanding shares of a publicly traded company, the largest owner, manager and developer of student housing properties in the United States.
Lender’s counsel in connection with $375 million HDC/Freddie Mac Risk Share bond financing as part of NYCHA’s Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (PACT) initiative collateralized by multifamily residential housing developments comprised of 2,625 units located in Brooklyn, New York.