J. Barry Curtin

As a real estate lawyer for 42 years, Mr. Curtin has handled numerous real estate closings including transactions involving 1031 Exchange and other tax saving transactions. He has developed a sub specialty in the administrative law areas of land use approvals and environmental regulations. Mr. Curtin has appeared before a variety of municipal, state and federal agencies and has been responsible for securing approvals for large P.U.D.’s and a DRI as well as other land development projects throughout southeast Florida. He has performed extensive client representation to secure development permits and various municipal approvals for real estate development in Palm Beach, Martin and Broward Counties. He has also represented numerous clients concerning real property valuations, ad valorem taxation and tax appeals. In his practice, he has represented clients on eminent domain and inverse condemnation matters before municipal and state agencies.

Mr. Curtin has been responsible for negotiating, placing under contract and closing a variety of real estate sales and acquisitions. In the course of this real estate transactional practice he has handled complex acquisition and tax deferred exchange issues and the accompanying title insurance and financing requirements  to close these transactions. He has advised clients on entity selections for holding real property, performed due diligence in determining and performed loan closing documentation to allow property acquisitions.

Mr. Curtin has had managing responsibility in a number of complex land use litigations matters in both Pennsylvania and in Florida during his legal career. He has consulted on strategies and negotiated the resolutions of several complex land use litigation matters, in concert with litigation attorneys, in South Florida and has been instrumental in the satisfactory resolution of several major land use disputes involving various state agencies and municipal jurisdictions.

Mr. Curtin originally apprenticed with one of the leading land use litigation firms in Philadelphia whose senior partner argued the seminal PUD case of Village II at New Hope case. This early exposure to appellate land use litigation issues  provided  a unique grounding in the fundamentals of land use municipal regulation and environmental law. Through this practice experience he was invited to lecture at ULI/ABA conference on the use of expert witnesses in land use litigation and became a guest lecturer at Villanova  University  on the uses of partnerships as an ownership vehicle for real estate.

Mr. Curtin was employed as counsel by ITT at Palm Coast, Florida as attorney for the 42,000 -acre new community being developed in north Florida beginning in the early 1980's. Du ring this employment, he was responsible for the acquisition of large tracts of beachfront land and participated in initiating the DRI process for the Hammock Dunes Community.

Mr. Curtin was born in New York, NY, November 7, 1942; admitted to the bar in 1974, in the State of Pennsylvania and U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania; Mr. Curtin was admitted to the Florida Bar in 1979, Florida.