Eric J. Piesner

Eric is a highly accomplished practitioner with more than 25 years of experience in guiding clients through all stages of the real estate investment cycle, including fund formation and restructuring, real estate financing, strategic M&A, private equity and multi-investor club deals, development, dispositions, and exits.

He has represented companies in all major real estate asset classes – particularly hotel/resort and industrial properties – worldwide, including the United States, Japan, China, India, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Brazil, and Hong Kong.

Eric serves as a firm-wide Managing Partner, Asia Managing Partner, and heads MoFo’s market-leading Asia Real Estate practice.

He spent 10 years in Morrison & Foerster’s Tokyo office where he was consistently recognized as one of the leading U.S. real estate attorneys in Japan by Chambers Asia Pacific and an elite “Leading Lawyer” by The Legal 500 Asia Pacific. Eric was also recognized in the 2018 edition of Chambers Global for his work in Singapore and Japan for Investment Funds. He has also been recognized for Real Estate law in Singapore by Best Lawyers since 2009.

Eric inspires confidence and loyalty in his clients who describe him as “a top-level lawyer” who is “very strong,” “intelligent and able to absorb a great deal of information quickly.”  “He’s a great resource – I can call him at any time and he’s got all the knowledge.”

Eric lived in Japan for 15 years and is proficient in spoken and written Japanese.

Representative Experience

• GLP Pte. Ltd. in its US$11.64 billion privatization, the largest-ever private equity buyout of an Asian company by enterprise value. (ALB SE Asia Law Awards 2018: M&A Deal of the Year (Premium); The Asia Legal Awards 2018: M&A Deal of the Year: Southeast Asia 2017 Global PERE Awards: Deal of the Year, Asia; FinanceAsia’s 2017 Deal of the Year and Best Leveraged Finance Deal).
• IndoSpace on the formation of IndoSpace Core, its US$1.2 billion joint venture with Canada Pension Plan Investment Board that will focus on acquiring and developing logistics facilities in India.
• GLP on the acquisition of a US$4.55 billion U.S. logistics portfolio from Industrial Income Trust making it the second-largest logistics property owner and operator in the United States within a year of market entry.
• GLP on the establishment of CLF II, US$7 billion infrastructure fund, the largest logistics infrastructure fund based in China. CLF II is more than double the size of US$3 billion CLF I, the world’s largest China-focused logistics fund to date in 2014. We also represented GLP in the formation of CLF I.
• Host Hotels & Resorts in connection with its hotel acquisition and development work in Asia, including projects in India and Australia.
• ING Real Estate Investment Management in connection with its assumption of management and control of New City Corporation’s US$772,000,000 pan-Asia real estate fund (Japan, China, and Korea).