Auria Malek
Counsel
Auria Malek is a transactional real estate and corporate attorney with broad experience representing developers, owners, lenders and investors across the full lifecycle of real estate assets. His core practice includes the acquisition, development, leasing, joint venture structuring, and financing of commercial real estate. He maintains a niche focus in the hospitality and leisure sectors, including hotels, resort communities, and complex mixed-use developments that integrate branded residential, retail, and lodging components. Auria regularly drafts and negotiates purchase and sale agreements, hotel management agreements, loan documents, and partnership agreements, while advising on deal structuring and risk allocation.
Auria also has experience advising on land use and entitlement matters, including navigating local regulatory frameworks and performing diligence on development feasibility. His corporate work includes equity-side financings, capital structuring, and joint venture arrangements related to real estate investments. More broadly, he has represented emerging growth companies and institutional clients in venture capital financings, mergers and acquisitions, and general corporate transactions—experience that enhances his ability to advise on complex, multidisciplinary deals.
A licensed California real estate broker and Class B general contractor, Auria brings a multidimensional perspective to legal practice. He holds degrees in civil and environmental engineering, business administration, and law, and has prior experience managing real estate development and investment projects. This combination of technical, financial, and legal knowledge enables him to provide clients with practical, business-oriented guidance on complex corporate transactions and sophisticated real estate deals, as well as development strategy.
Selected Experience
- Represented a family office in the joint venture acquisition, development, financing, rebranding, redevelopment, hotel management agreement, and marina management agreement for a 167-room waterfront hotel, conference center, and approximately 200-slip marina.
- Represented a private equity fund in the structured partition and joint venture acquisition and redevelopment of two golf course hotels, including the legal separation of hotel and golf course and the negotiation of CC&Rs, reciprocal easements, shared use rights, and amenity access agreements.
- Represented a private equity fund in the acquisition and development of a mountain resort hotel in Colorado, situated on land encumbered by a to-be constructed ski resort gondola easement.
- Represented developer in the negotiations of hotel management agreements, residential license agreements, technical services agreements, and related documents in connection with the development of a suite of hotels and branded residences amounting to an approximately $1.5 Billion development.
- Represented a private equity real estate developer in a $250 Million acquisition of a fully occupied, 278,000-square-foot, twin-tower office campus.
- Represented lender in deed-in-lieu foreclosure of $250 Million operating hotel in downtown San Francisco.
- Represented private equity fund in a $100 Million acquisition of an approximately 350-key hotel, including negotiation of deal terms involving a branded hotel asset with residential condominium components and a complex renovation and refinancing history.
- Represented a family office in a $200 Million portfolio sale of 20 self-storage facilities, which included structuring the preservation of a revolving line of credit secured by the properties to-be sold.
- Represented the buyer in a $250 million acquisition of a venture-backed software company, advising on deal structure, diligence, and negotiation of definitive agreements to support expansion into container-based infrastructure and Kubernetes technologies.
- Represented a technology company in a $15.2 million equity and debt financing round for a relationship intelligence and CRM automation platform, including negotiation of financing documents and investor rights in connection with a venture-backed capital raise led by a Canadian institutional investor.
Publications
- Contributor, Hotel Management Agreements: The Rise of the Unbranded, The American College of Real Estate Lawyers (ACREL) Papers, Fall 2023.
Memberships
- Urban Land Institute
- Iranian American Bar Association