Lending a Career’s Worth of Expertise

Susan Booth (MBA/J.D. ’91) is a partner at Holland & Knight and the former leader of its West Coast real estate group. “Most of the time I do a wide range of real estate financing and purchase and sale transactions, but in the current environment, I’m doing a lot of real estate workouts from both the borrower side as well as the lender side,” says Booth. Workouts, she says, involve properties that are no longer worth the debt on them. Booth’s work entails finding creative ways to resolve those situations, whether that means a lender’s reducing the interest rate, extending a maturity date or discounting the amount of debt, or a borrower’s giving back the property.

“Workouts are tough. One of the reasons I got involved in real estate and real estate law is that I enjoyed the transactions,” Booth says. “And one of the elements I most relish is that people are excited to be engaging in those transactions. They have hopes and dreams about how they’re going to make a lot of money or improve some aspect of the world. It’s a win-win situation. In workouts, your best case is win-lose but most of the time it’s a lose-lose situation. No one is happy or satisfied.”

Though she earned both law and management degrees at UCLA, Booth concedes that for the most part, her legal bona fides constitute the dominant part of her job. But, she says, her business degree has also played a significant role as well.

“Good lawyers know the law, great lawyers know the law and understand their client’s business. You’re able to offer advice in context if you understand what your client is doing, how they’re trying to do it and the industry in which they operate,” she says. “Having an MBA gave me a greater and a faster understanding of what it is my clients do, the industries they’re in and the things that are of a concern to them. It also helps me tailor my advice in a manner that works best for each individual client and is understandable and practical.”

In addition to her work with Holland & Knight, Booth is committed to education and mentoring. Those personal priorities led her to join the board of the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate, which, though housed in and operated by UCLA Anderson, is a joint research center of Anderson and the UCLA School of Law. Her entrée to the Ziman Center came initially through her friendship with Tim Kawahara, the center’s founding executive director. She says the opportunity to get involved went beyond simply supporting her alma mater, it was also an opportunity to become involved in education in her joint areas of expertise.

Her firm conducts the annual Real Estate Joint Venture Challenge, known as the JV Challenge. It brings together graduate-level law, business and real estate development students from UCLA and UC Berkeley to work alongside each other in a competitive environment to solve real estate joint venture issues similar to those they may face in their careers post-graduation. Starting in 2013, the JV Challenge was conducted by Pircher, Nichols & Meeks LLP, whose lawyers joined Holland & Knight in 2022 and established the firm’s Century City office. The challenge was conducted for the first time by Holland & Knight in 2023 and again in 2024 and hosted at UCLA, and Booth was one of the coaches both years.

Booth also sees her involvement with Anderson as an opportunity to support the Ziman Center’s commitment to adding alternative points of view to its programming and its board, where greater diversity is a goal.

“I know they’re working to make progress on that,” she says. “The simple fact of life is that, in Southern California, the power and the dollars in the real estate industry belong primarily to white men. Most of those men earned their place, and I have no desire to see them robbed of what they have earned. My goal is to ensure that everyone has the same opportunity to succeed as they did. I have spent most of my career trying to effectuate change and to make the industry much more inclusive and open to everyone.

“I fought a lot of discrimination and still do, frankly. It’s more subtle than it was, but it’s still there. I would like it to be easier for other women and people of color to succeed in the real estate industry. The Ziman Center seemed like a great organization and a great platform that I could become involved with to try to make the industry more inclusive,” Booth says.

“My message to a woman currently earning her MBA or J.D./MBA is that we have come a tremendous way in the last 30 years but there is still progress to be made. There are a lot of people in the real estate industry now who recognize the benefits of diversity and are taking affirmative steps to make the industry more inclusive. I expect progress  to continue but have no expectations that the problem will resolve itself overnight. Women and people of color should be prepared to encounter some bias. It’s not right, and I do not defend it, but it is the reality. I am a big believer in hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.

“I hear from a number of women right after they graduate. They tell me, ‘Susan, it’s so much better now. There’s not a problem. Everybody gets treated equally.’ Then, three to five years later, when they start getting overlooked for promotions, they call and say, ‘You were right.’ Again, I think we’re making progress and I’m optimistic, but I also think there’s a lot of ground to be covered, and a lot of structural changes that still have to be made,” she says.

“Certainly, for the first half of my career, my support came solely from older, white men because there were no women real estate partners to mentor me, and there were no women clients,” she says. “Men championed me and gave me tremendous opportunities, with the implicit caveat that I had to be far better than my male counterparts in order to get them to work with me. So I was, and they did.” Booth says that most people she encounters mean well and are not intentionally biased. “There have been many occasions when I have been the only woman in a room when a man swears, and then he apologizes to me alone,” she says “While he may be trying to be polite, his actions suggest that I am more delicate than the others in the room, which I most assuredly am not.

“Many men nowadays, those who are a little bit younger and have working wives or have daughters, are much more attuned to the issues facing women and people of color. I’m hopeful about future progress because there is much greater awareness now than there was before,” she says. “But I’m also very practical. Each person needs to figure out how it is they’re going to succeed. The cards may be stacked against you a little bit, and it shouldn’t be that way. I want to level the playing field. But until the playing field is leveled, I don’t think you do anyone any favors by pretending like it’s a level playing field.”

One way Booth is trying to level the playing field is through the establishment of the Susan J. Booth Real Estate Fellowship, a planned gift offering financial support to an Anderson student focusing on real estate. Booth, who, before joining the Ziman Center advisory board, was also a long-time member of the Anderson’s Real Estate Alumni Group, says that her place in the real estate community made the Ziman Center a natural fit for her and her husband’s philanthropy. Although fellowships cannot be exclusively designated for women, the criteria for the fellowship include a strong preference for female applicants.

“I wanted to give back in a way that could help other women succeed,” Booth says.