Minnesota Lawyer
One of the interesting projects Ben Grannon recently worked on involves Moment, a new Sherman Associates’ apartment building that shares a city block with Thrivent’s downtown Minneapolis corporate headquarters.
Sherman Associates bought the property from Thrivent as part of a deal to share underground parking and to ensure the construction of a skyway between the two buildings. The 222-unit apartment building, now under construction, will include retail space featuring a day care center and an office and transitional burn recovery center of Firefighters for Healing, an organization that assists burn victims.
“We did a lot of work with them to make sure that the block operates as one, essentially,” including agreements for shared access, operations and parking, Grannon says.
Grannon, Sherman’s assistant general counsel, has gotten used to complex commercial real estate projects during his four years at the firm and jobs earlier in his career. After graduating cum laude from Mitchell Hamline School of Law, he served as the attorney for Open Access Technology International Inc. (OATI), an energy software developer.
His biggest project involved the construction of an office with a microgrid that included solar panels, small wind turbines, energy storage and a combined heat and power system. The OATI Microgrid Technology Center went on to win two real estate awards. “That was my focus, driving that project along,” he says.
His introduction to law came when he took a legal course as part of a business degree program at the University of Iowa. Graduating in 2009, with finance jobs hard to find, Grannon decided to attend law school. The desire to work in commercial real estate emerged during his time at OATI.
“I decided after helping create the microgrid center that this was something I wanted to pursue, and I began looking for different options that would allow me more exposure to real estate,” he says. The position at Sherman Associates fits that aspiration perfectly.
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