About Joshua Stein

Joshua Stein, a member of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers, the American College of Mortgage Attorneys, and the Association for Real Property and Infrastructure (formerly AARPI), has wide experience in commercial real estate transactions, development transactions, new and defaults loans, and other real estate matters and disputes. He has handled closings and resolved problems for ground leases, hotels, developments, and space leases. He has represented secured lenders, purchasers, sellers, investors, developers, borrowers, landlords, tenants, leasehold mortgagees, and hotel operators. 

Joshua has been engaged as an expert witness, an arbitrator, a mediator, and a court-appointed receiver and referee. His name appears on the New York State Unified Court System Part 36 Fiduciary List for those and other appointments. He is a former chair of the New York State Bar Association’s Real Property Law Section, as well as a former co-chair of the Section’s Commercial Leasing Committee. Since 1997, Joshua has chaired Practising Law Institute’s annual two-day seminar on commercial real estate finance. He speaks regularly before real estate industry and legal audiences and is often quoted in the real estate and business press, but never about his own transactions. 

Joshua obtained his law degree from Columbia Law School, where he was a managing editor of the Columbia Law Review and a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. He obtained his undergraduate degree from University of California, Berkeley (highest honors, Phi Beta Kappa).

Before law school, Joshua had a brief career in book publishing. In high school and college, he worked part-time for local newspapers.  Highlights of his journalism career included a front-page interview with Steven Weed (Patty Hearst’s boyfriend at the time) and a front-page article about his experience working as a municipal garbage collector for a day.

He is an active member of the Board of Trustees of The Bronx Museum of the Arts and an art collector, with an emphasis on (a) paintings of buildings, particularly by Emilio Sanchez; (b) abstract works by Joao Henrique Brandao; and (c) California landscape paintings produced by his father, Sherman Stein, a retired professor of mathematics at University of California, Davis. His mother, Hannah Stein, is a poet who published her fifth book of poetry, World in Costume, in 2020 shortly after her 91st birthday. He has two daughters: Helaina, a U.S. foreign service officer; and Julia, who works in digital advertising. He lives in New York.