About

With more than 17 years of experience as general counsel for real estate companies, Claudia Rosso Rizo is a respected and admired in-house legal expert. Her years as a real estate lawyer for Canadian based Reichmann International (2001 to 2012) fine-tuned her skills as she implemented all related transactions for the company. In spring 2012, Rosso joined Abilia, one of Mexico’s largest, most experienced and reliable real estate developers. As general counsel she made key changes to ensure Abilia’s continued success – ‘I restructured the legal team by bringing in skilled lawyers to work on the day-to-day transactions and by establishing guidelines and methods to be implemented on all projects. As a result we now have a creative and high performing legal team in all of our deals and transactions’. Rosso plays a key role in the company’s most important transactions, as witnessed by her legal leadership on the sale of a two tower office building complex, commercially known as Terret – which was the largest single asset transaction in Mexico during 2014 – and the sale in 2017 of a retail centre to a Public REIT. Rosso has also contributed to Abilia’s international expansion, by working on acquisitions of a number of performing assets in various parts of the US, including a joint venture of a multifamily fund. Before her time at Abilia and Reichmann, Rosso was a junior lawyer working at García Barragán. On her career highlights there she says, ‘the finance restructure of one of the main Mexican Airlines and after that working on the splitting and re-structure of one of the main real estate companies definitely moulded me as a lawyer’.