Specialties
Some Central Iowa transactions need more than a transactional attorney drafting the documents. They need a lawyer who has worked the deal type before: one who understands how the public financing, the tax credits, the infill mechanics, or the construction risk allocation actually fit together with the rest of the project.
The specialties below are the deal types where Conveyance Law goes deep. Each has its own statutory framework, its own institutional players, and its own conventions, and most projects in Central Iowa today touch two or three of them at once. We structure and document the legal architecture; we work alongside the architects, civil engineers, accountants, lenders, contractors, and city staff whose work the documents need to support.
Two ways we organize our work.
Specialties
The deals we go deep on.
Deal types with their own statutory framework and institutional players: TIF and public financing, historic tax credits, LIHTC, and mixed-use infill. Complex projects usually involve one specialty and several services.
Services
The documents we draft.
The specific transactions and documents behind a deal: closings, title opinions, purchase agreements, leases, loan documents, business formation. Most are offered at a published flat fee, confirmed in writing before work begins.
Our Specialties
Four deal types where we go deep.
Mixed-Use and Infill Development
Site assemblage through stabilization on commercial, mixed-use, residential, and rehabilitation infill projects across Central Iowa. The work concentrates on what makes infill harder than greenfield: smaller and older parcels, deep title histories, political entitlement processes, and the legal structures that hold mixed-use buildings together. To accomplish this, we put together condominium regimes, vertical subdivisions, and reciprocal easement agreements.
Tax Increment Financing (TIF)
Iowa Code §403 work, including urban renewal plans, development agreements, minimum assessment agreements under §403.6(19), TIF opinion letters for lenders, and the integration with the layered capital stacks that fund Central Iowa development. We represent developers, lenders, and property owners on TIF-supported transactions and routinely opine on the enforceability and assignability of TIF rebate streams.
Historic Tax Credits
Federal IRC §47 and Iowa state historic preservation tax credit transactions, including three-part NPS application coordination, master tenant structures, Section 50(d) elections, investor equity documentation, and the partnership and operating agreements that hold rehabilitation projects together. The federal and Iowa credits stack on most large Central Iowa rehabilitations, and the structuring decisions that maximize one can constrain the other.
LIHTC: Low-Income Housing Tax Credits
Iowa Finance Authority QAP work, 9% competitive deals, 4% bond-financed deals with TEFRA hearings, partnership formation and operating agreement negotiation, the LURAs that bind affordable properties for the extended use period, and the Year 15 transactions that resolve LIHTC partnerships when the compliance period ends. We represent developers, lenders, and property owners on these deals.
Working together
How these specialties intersect
Most real Central Iowa development deals touch more than one of these specialties. A typical mixed-use rehabilitation project pulls in TIF, federal and Iowa historic tax credits, sometimes LIHTC for the residential floors, conventional construction and permanent debt, and construction-law issues across the build. The structuring choices on any one specialty constrain the others: the entity that maximizes federal HTC value can limit state HTC treatment; the TIF rebate stream’s collateral assignability affects how the construction lender underwrites; the LIHTC partnership’s allocation provisions need to coexist with the master tenant structure.
We work the integration. That’s the point of the firm.
Get Started
Working with our firm
If you’re considering a project, structuring a transaction, or working through a problem that’s developing, we’d be glad to talk. The decisions made early in a deal compound, and engaging the right legal counsel before the structure is locked in is meaningfully more valuable than fixing things later.
Conveyance Law, PLC | Des Moines, Iowa | 515.519.3600
