Eminent Domain Explained: What Real Estate Investors Must Know When the Government Takes Property

Anthony DellaPelle (00:00)
I’ve seen clients have had drastic life changing ⁓ impacts from losing their properties. What if it’s your family business and ⁓ it’s a third generation business and that’s what you do. And then the government wants to take your property and you can’t relocate it anywhere because it would only succeed in that one location. Those are really hard moments to ⁓ help people through them.

is extremely rewarding. ⁓ I always ⁓ like to think that the eminent domain practice is no less than the third most ⁓ intrusive way in which a government can affect your life.

Q Edmonds (02:20)
everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I am your host, Q Edmonds. I’m excited to be here today. ⁓ man, I have someone who is well-versed in that field, ⁓ has experience. And I’ll let him decide if he’s going to tell you the number. But let me just tell you, has experience, right? The subject matter that we’re going to talk about is well-versed, like I said. And I’m so excited about what he’s

what he does and I mean, very proficient at what he’s at what he do. And I’m going to let him explain it, but I mean, it’s not too many people that can do what he does. And so I’m excited. I’m excited for us to just look from things from his lens, learn from his experience. And so I’m so excited to introduce you all to Mr. Anthony DellaPelle. Mr. Anthony, how you doing today,

Anthony DellaPelle (03:00)
Okay.

I’m doing really well. Thanks, Quentin. Appreciate the opportunity to be with you here today.

Q Edmonds (03:18)
Absolutely, sir. I’m so glad you’re here, man. And I’m excited about this because, again, I love learning. And I believe you want to tell us a lot today that maybe we don’t know. And so I am the type. I like to dive right in. So I would love if you would tell the people, what’s your main focus these days? If you don’t mind, give us a little bit of an origin story, kind of how you got into the space that you’re in. And then if you can tell them where you are in the world, people love to know where people are geographically. And so.

What’s your main focus, your origin story and where you are? Mr. Anthony, sir, you have the floor.

Anthony DellaPelle (03:53)
Thank you so much. So I’ll apologize up front because I’m a lawyer. And I know that lawyers get a bad rap and maybe to some degree that’s deserved. But what I do and what my firm does is ⁓ specialized ⁓ in two main focuses of real estate related law. Although, and I’ll get to that in a moment, my background led me

to what I do now because I grew up in a real estate family and married into a real estate family. Thanksgiving, we’d be talking about real estate deals and I was 20 years old and it was always part of our DNA. ⁓ I started working while I was in school ⁓ as a real estate paralegal and I did hundreds and hundreds of real estate closings back in the ⁓ early 80s.

And then I was also a title searcher where I understood how title was transferred. And when you are a title searcher, have to search back in time to confirm the ownership interests in real estate. So it’s like a history lesson in real estate. ⁓ As I got out of law school, I went to law school in New Jersey, which is where I ⁓ live and work in northern New Jersey. We’re a New York City suburb ⁓ with a commuter train that takes you into Manhattan. ⁓

I continued my real estate transactional practice and I got into handling ⁓ commercial and residential real estate ⁓ sales and commercial leases and I did land use and zoning entitlement work, ⁓ which is a big deal in our state because of New Jersey because it’s very heavily regulated and the zoning regulations are one of those sets of regulations as are the environmental ones that affect how real estate is developed and used and reused.

⁓ But I found that ⁓ as I was at a larger law firm, ⁓ I found that I was really lacking in what I’ll call a ⁓ focus about 10 years into my career. I got tired of going to these meetings at night to try to get people approvals to build buildings. Even though that was interesting, it was exhausting. Fortunately, early in my career,

I had some exposure into the two things that I do here and that our firm does here. One of them is real estate tax appeals. And the other is eminent domain law where the government takes your property. Both of those ⁓ law practices focus on real estate valuation. And my background in doing transactions and zoning work really ⁓ gave me a good foundation for what I do now, because you have to understand how real estate is used, developed, reused, ⁓ managed.

and ⁓ how it’s and sold in order to understand its value. So our work is mostly litigation, and ⁓ most of the litigation is focused on the valuation of the real estate assets. However, the redevelopment practice, is within our eminent domain practice, at least in New Jersey and some urban states like ours, have a very active redevelopment practice.

The word redevelopment in New Jersey means something that may be different than it means in other states, because in New Jersey redevelopment is actually a planning process that local government agencies like towns and cities can go through to take one area or one piece of real estate and transform it from one use to new uses. So if you think about states like mine, which are basically fully developed, any significant development

is not going to be done on virgin land. It’s going to be done on land that already had something else on it. So it’s redeveloped and the redevelopment process is very complicated and it involves some planning and zoning tools and it provides ⁓ incentives to the redevelopers to come in and take that underutilized ⁓ old factory and knock it down and turn it into apartments. You know, as an example, ⁓ and there are financial incentives and zoning incentives that come with it.

Q Edmonds (08:25)
Mm.

Anthony DellaPelle (08:52)
⁓ and, ⁓ and so it translates well to the work that I did in my, in my past as I’ve described. So we have, ⁓ we have seven lawyers here at our firm. Our law practice is limited to New Jersey, but I am, ⁓ part of two different professional organizations, which give us both national, international exposure and networks. ⁓ one of them is called owners council of America.

It is limited to lawyers who specialize in representing property owners against the government with respect to their property rights. If the government uses eminent domain takings, one lawyer per state, you have to be elected on the New Jersey representative. And if you need an eminent domain lawyer in Alabama or Colorado or Texas or Florida, I know the people who are at the top of the food chain very well. We consider ourselves ⁓ unofficial.

partners, we’re not legal partners. We’re not really even economic partners, but we’re partners in our brain trust and in our referral network. And we help each other with heart issues and problem solving and help each other with our clients. Because a lot of us share the same clients or get them from each other. So that’s one organization. It’s a United States, you know, American organization, Owners Council of America. The second organization is called the Counselors of Real Estate.

You may see sometimes that there are people in the real estate business who use the the letter CRE after their name. If it has a little registered trademark, that means they’re part of the council’s real estate, not just CRE meaning commercial real estate. ⁓ And there are about a thousand CREs around the world located in, think it’s 22 different countries. ⁓ And we are multidisciplinary. We represent…

I think more than 60 different professional disciplines in the real estate industry. So the organization is made up. There are lawyers like me, less than 10 % of the members are lawyers. There are real estate appraisers. There are developers. There are urban planners, engineers, people involved in capital markets, property management, brokers. The key thing for the counselors of real estate is that you, ⁓ in order to be ⁓ invited to membership, you have to be elected or invited to membership in that organization too.

You have to have ⁓ done what you do for at least 10 years. You have to have ⁓ achieved a certain level of recognition and prominence in your field. And you have to be recommended by others to become a member. And then you have to provide counseling services. So that’s something that is a little bit ⁓ ambiguous to some folks, but I like to dumb it down, as I say, by just explaining that counseling is at least real estate counseling.

is helping other people solve real estate problems. What is your problem? How can I help you solve it? Do I know the answer? If not, I guarantee I know someone who does, because I’m part of this organization, and they’ll help you. So those two different organizations give our very little specialized law practice in New Jersey a much broader ⁓ coverage and much broader network and ⁓ much broader knowledge base to help our clients in what we do.

So I’ll stop. don’t know if I said what you wanted me to, or if there’s anything else I left out that I can answer.

Q Edmonds (12:51)
No, sir. That was a well thought out answer. I appreciate it. You you took me through the journey of kind of how you got started. You took me to what it is that you do now. And so, no, that was a well thought out answer and I appreciate it. You know, as you was talking, was actively listening and I was writing some things now because I love the journey. You know, I love when we get a chance to kind of peek through the journey because we have people on the different walks of that journey. You know, some of them more further along than others.

but I’m also always interested in the journey. So as you was talking, like I said, writing some things now, I want to give you a quick summary, kind of your journey, because I want to make a statement and I’m going to ask you a question. All right. And so, you you told us you grew up in a real estate family, actually married into a real estate family as well. Sat around the table, you all talked about real estate. He was a paralegal in school, you know, in the 80s. He also was a title searcher.

did law school in New Jersey, and you kind of got into handling commercial and into title and zoning, different areas like that. You felt like for like 10 years of your career, 10 years into your career, that it really was kind of like lacking focus, like you wanted something a little bit different. And then where you at now, you got into real estate, tax appeal with eminent domain law.

And that’s when the government try to come and take the property. And now pretty much work in litigation, like you can litigate, you know, most cases and stuff. So is that a pretty good summary of the journey, kind of how you got to where you are now?

Anthony DellaPelle (14:25)
Yeah, I think that’s all accurate and well done. I’m not at the end, but I’m certainly on the back night of my journey. And I will tell you that while our practice can always result in litigation as I’ve gotten older and gotten more complicated work, staying out of court is one of the objectives.

Q Edmonds (15:32)
yeah. ⁓ yeah.

Anthony DellaPelle (15:33)
⁓

Now in eminent domain, you have to be in court because the government has to actually start a lawsuit to take your property. Right. They’re going to if they’re going to widen the highway in front of your shopping center, they have to actually file a lawsuit to take the strip of land. So there is litigation, but we don’t always have to go to trial. And I love jury trials. I mean, I really enjoy them very much. But what I found is I’ve gone on in my career is that the the scope of the services that are demanded

Q Edmonds (15:39)
wow.

Yeah. Yeah.

Anthony DellaPelle (16:03)
or requested of me, particular since I’m a senior level person and, you know, been doing this for 39 years now, is that you are looking for ways to resolve the issues without having to be in court because court can be risky. And you try to, you know, real estate is a business and you have to understand the, you know, the costs and benefits and the rewards, you have to stay on the risks. And if you can do that well for your clients as an advisor, you help guide them in the right direction.

You know when you can settle something when you can’t. Sometimes you gotta go to trial, sometimes you don’t.

Q Edmonds (16:38)
love this, sir. I absolutely love it. And I love how you talked about, you’re kind of on kind of the back nine of the career, but I’m glad you put the number out there, 39 years. So you’ve been on this journey for a while. So this is the statement that I make. And I asked the question. So the statement I normally make, Mr. Anthony, every podcast, is that destiny has no wasted moments. Meaning, like, as we go through the journey, it kind of fortifies the people that we are now.

And we borrow from each leg of the journey, from the success, from the failure. And we know why we do what we do. And so I often ask, what has the journey taught you about yourself? What has the moments taught you about you? Has it you discipline, resilience? Has it changed your mindset, innovation? What has the journey brought about for you in this journey?

Anthony DellaPelle (17:33)
think the best way I can answer that is to say that the journey has taught me that as I get older, I realize more and more how much I don’t know. You know, you have successes and failures in life and all aspects of life, personal, professional, whatever it is. You know, I’ve won matters, I’ve lost matters. I’ve won cases I didn’t think I would win. I’ve lost cases I thought I would win. I’ve seen clients, especially in the eminent domain side of the practice.

Q Edmonds (17:42)
Hmm.

Anthony DellaPelle (18:03)
I’ve seen clients have had drastic life changing ⁓ impacts from losing their properties. What if it’s your family business and ⁓ it’s a third generation business and that’s what you do. And then the government wants to take your property and you can’t relocate it anywhere because it would only succeed in that one location. Those are really hard moments to ⁓ help people through them.

is extremely rewarding. ⁓ I always ⁓ like to think that the eminent domain practice is no less than the third most ⁓ intrusive way in which a government can affect your life.

I think the first is criminal law because you can use your liberty or your life in states where there’s capital punishment, right? The second is family law.

You can lose your kids, custody of your kids, the right to see them, right? Your money, because you have to divide it up with your spouse, your ex-spouse. The third of the things is the eminent domain looks. You can lose your property. It could be your home. It can be your business. It can be an investment and you may never get that back. And coming to grips with that is, you know, along my journey, I’ve really come to appreciate the fact that I think I’m privileged to be able to help people through that.

And I will tell people on the eminent domain side of my practice, this is not going to be fun. Okay. It’s going to be really tough. But I hope at the end, you’ll feel as if you were treated fairly and got a fair result and that we made the best of the bad situation, right? You make the lemonade out of lemons kind of a situation. And I think that that’s really the thing that epitomizes my journey the most because I feel so much more well equipped now.

to guide people through that process. when I, when I first started doing this work full time, I always did it from the very beginning of my career in the mid 1980s. I started doing it full time in 1997. I would get a case and the government was going to take your property. You figured out what the value is. And if you agreed, you got a price. You know, it’s a real estate transaction. If you didn’t, went to court and you went, got a jury to give you the number. ⁓ it’s so much deeper than that because there’s so many other loose ends that come into play.

about the people that are involved and what impact it has on their lives, whether it be their personal lives, it’s professional lives, or sometimes it’s a combination of both. We’ve seen people, husbands and wives, get divorced because the property was taken. Obviously, in the real estate business, there are so many commercial real estate properties that are held in partnership type or LLC interests. Those partners get into disputes and break up to whether they’re married or not.

So you have to live through that. then, you know, I think if my, if my experience has taught me anything, it’s that you shouldn’t just expect that you know how to do something because you did it before, because it’s always different. Every situation is different. Every case is different. ⁓ The people are different. The issues are different. They might seem like something you did before, but don’t take it for granted. That’s exactly the same because it’s not going to be that. So that’s the way I would, I think I would answer your question.

Q Edmonds (21:23)
Yeah, thank you, man. Thank you for the introspective question. I mean, answer, reflective answer. I appreciate that. Mr. Anthony, what’s next for you, sir? What’s your next real goal? What are you looking to solve at scale next,

Anthony DellaPelle (21:37)
So I think there are ⁓ two big picture issues for me in the next phase of my career. ⁓ One of them is to make sure that I I’m comfortable with what I’m going to call the succession of my business because it’s going to be around forever and I’m not going to be around forever. And because I think that what we do is important to help people.

understand their property rights when they’re dealing with the government. I want to make sure that I leave a legacy that can be taken over and adapted and hopefully enhanced by others. So that’s important to me to find that next generation, not only of lawyers, but people that work in the fields that we deal with, the consulting fields in real estate business. ⁓

So that’d be one item. next, the other thing that I think is a big picture item for the next, ⁓ at least several years is figuring out the best way to, or ways to integrate emerging technologies, including the use of artificial intelligence into our practice and into the real estate industry, ⁓ because it’s so important because real estate is such a data, ⁓ focused industry that, ⁓ I’m seeing it come into.

use more and more almost every day in new ways. And ⁓ I can’t imagine that it’s going to be a perfect ⁓ marriage. I think that there are going to be problems and bumps along the way because as I said earlier, you always learn. I can’t tell you that I know how to use AI really effectively, but if I know what it’s capable of and I can find other people to help me use it at my age, my advanced age, right? ⁓

then I might be able to do my job better and help my clients more. And that’s my goal, to see how AI and technology affect the next phase of my career. Just like, I was just talking about this yesterday, I was in a court hearing and we had a little downtime and the lawyers and the judge were talking about how, because we’re old enough to remember this, we started practicing law before there were computers. Right? And how did that work?

⁓ when you had to file a a hundred page brief in a court, you know what you did? You hand wrote it. And then you hired people that were typists to come in and type it. And you’d have the chance to cut and paste electronically before word processing was available to the consumers. So you actually cut pieces of paper and pasted them in different pages with tape, scotch tape. And it probably took, ⁓ multiples of the amount of time to write the same amount of product.

But I do know from my own experience that we were pretty effective then. It kind of made you think more before you put pen to paper about what you wanted to say and communicate instead of just spitting stuff out and knowing you could play around with it with technology. So that’s a very rudimentary bridge between starting to practice law when people only had typewriters to now where if you told me that you had a shopping center and you wanted me to file a tax appeal for you.

Q Edmonds (24:36)
Yeah.

Mmm.

Anthony DellaPelle (25:02)
During the call, I could pull up information about your property, not just Google Maps. I could pull up the assessment information. There may be history about the leasing ⁓ activity on it. ⁓ There may be other information about encumbrances on that property, like there’s a power line in the back and the power company wants to clip part of the property, which might affect the parking. And it’s all there. So how do you take that and put it all together?

And I’ve heard some folks recently speak on the, on the integration of AI into, into real estate, ⁓ counseling. And they, some of these people who are really ahead of the curve, have AI agents every morning, delivering them work product that they’ve instructed it to do months ago. And it calls information for them. They open up a new file and automatically it pulls the comps, right? It finds out what other properties traded at, and it tells you, and it’s all packaged nicely.

Q Edmonds (25:54)
Yeah. Yeah.

Anthony DellaPelle (25:59)
So we’re at the, if this is a baseball game, I used golf before because I said it was on the back night. If this is a baseball game, real estate, not just law practice in real estate, but real estate itself, maybe we’re in the second inning with AI. Maybe.

So that’s what excites me about what’s going forward. And hopefully I’ll be around long enough to see how it changes everything.

Q Edmonds (26:22)
Yeah.

Mr. Anthony, sir, man, I appreciate you so much for coming on and just your wisdom and just the information that you gave. Listen, if someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate with you, learn more about what you’re doing, how can they get in contact with you,

Anthony DellaPelle (26:43)
a few ways. see my name just typed in and showed up in a Google search. There’s not too many of us with my name. My dad had the same name, but he passed about 20 years ago. So there is another lawyer in Michigan who practices in, I think, real estate fields with my name, but we’re not related. But just put it in, I’m on LinkedIn, very active on LinkedIn. My law firm, you don’t have to memorize the name, but our website is easy to remember. It’s

mrod.law. So you can put that in and find me and then my email address, my real one is longer, but you can use info at mrod.law. It’ll get to me. As I said, we have a New Jersey focused practice, but our network is both national and international. If you have a piece of property,

You want to know if you’re overassessed and can save money on property taxes, especially in a very highly taxed state like mine in New Jersey. ⁓ If we can’t do it, we’ll find you someone that can. And almost all of these folks, I believe all the people that I would work on a recommendation basis do what we do, which is we screen the matter. We’ll tell you whether or not we can help you before we take it on and start charging you. Right. We’ll say, you know what? You’ve got that shopping center. It’s it’s it’s probably worth five million.

but they have you assessed at 7.2. And this is how we can help you and what the results would be if we’re successful in reducing your property tax burden, which usually that goes right to the bottom line in your pocket as the owner operator of the property. In some commercial cases, the tenants get the benefit of it, depending on what the lease says, but we can definitely help you with that. And certainly if you live in an area that’s growing like North Texas, let’s build a new highways and leaps and bounds because the population is growing.

It’s Columbus, Ohio, another one, right? They’re doubling the size of the airport there because the population, because of the data centers that they’re building ⁓ there in particular, ⁓ are expected to increase the transportation needs. ⁓ There’s going to be infrastructure work that’s going to get in the way of your real estate. And if that happens, they want to build a bridge or they want to put a rail line in or build a highway or a jug handle or an exit or whatever it is.

We know the people that can help you if not in our state and I’m happy to work with anyone around the country to get them in the right hands and I’m confident I can.

Q Edmonds (29:16)
Listen, sir, I want to say three things to you, Mr. Anthony, man. First, thank you for your time. You you know you can get paid for your time. You know, you can charge a premium for your time. So thank you so much for giving us some of your time today. Secondly, thank you for your story, sir. Thank you for your authenticity, your honesty. And just thank you for the information that you gave. I believe, you know, we plant seeds and we never know when that seed is going to take root and spring up.

But we just put the seed there and I thank you for coming today and really planting some seeds that really can take root. lastly, thank you for your mindset. Thank you for the way you think. You’ve paid for with schooling, but also just with experience. So thank you for the way you think and bringing that mindset to this platform. I greatly appreciate you coming on today,

Anthony DellaPelle (30:07)
Well, I appreciate the opportunity. I’ve enjoyed our discussion and I’m happy to be of assistance to anyone who thinks I can.

Q Edmonds (30:14)
Absolutely. Well, listen, y’all heard Mr. Anthony. His information is in the show notes. So go on the show notes, get in contact with him. But definitely make sure you’re subscribed here, because I promise you, we’re going to continue to bring up amazing people just like Mr. Anthony. So sir, I say thank you again. And everyone else, listen, you have a fantastic day.