Brian narration: This is Built, a podcast series where you’ll meet the people behind some of the biggest transactions and investments in commercial real estate, and hear how they got to where they are today.

I’m your host Brian Maughan, chief marketing officer with Fidelity National Financial. 

And those of us in this business, well we know the buildings...but how many of us know the stories of the people behind those structures? 

This is the final episode of season two, and my guest is Antonia Miller. She is a lawyer with the firm Walsh Colucci in Arlington, Virginia. It’s a mid-sized firm that has established itself as a one stop shop for real estate and land use matters in Northern Virginia. 

Antonia brings her problem-solving skills to current day issues that often have their roots in the past. 

Brian Maughan: So are you from the Washington, D.C. metro area or you just kind of moved there for work?

Antonia Miller: I’m from Indianapolis, actually. And I came to D.C. with my family when I was in junior high. And I remember seeing during, like, the lunch hour some women running on the National Mall. And I sort of just forever kind of had that image in my head as this successful career woman working in D.C., taking her lunch hour and running on the Mall. And I just, I wanted to achieve that someday. And it's such a small thing, but that always stuck with me. And so I went to law school at William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and then found my way to D.C..

Brian Maughan: So when you moved to D.C. and you saw that, you know, lunch hour run and that kind of became this goal that you had, did you know you were going to be a real estate attorney?

Antonia Miller: You know, I was sort of interested in politics in high school and junior high. That kind of faded and, you know, that kind of segways well to law, when you go to law school, most people think that they're going to be a litigator and they're going to be in court all the time and they're going to, you know, have that aha moment like we see in the movies, you know, on their cases. But and so you don't even really know what a transactional attorney does in a lot of ways. I mean, I think we have a general sense that they draft documents, but it certainly wasn't what I was necessarily wanted to do. Kind of found my way with a summer internship at the firm and it just ended up being a great fit. Something about the transactional practice, the real estate transactional practices. What I can speak to most is, you know, you have someone who wants to sell property, you have someone who wants to buy property. You have two sides working towards a common goal. And that's something I just really enjoy about my practice, even when I'm speaking with someone who should be, you know, opposing counsel or someone on the other side, you know, we can all kind of just focus on problem solving. How do we get this deal done? And I absolutely love that about what I do. 

Brian Maughan: Let's talk a little bit about that transaction then. So from a daily perspective or if you think about some of the deals that you've been a part of, kind of walk me through maybe a highlight or a milestone or a memorable deal that kind of was early in your career that kind of locked you into, Hey, this is really good stuff. I like this. 

Antonia Miller: Sure. So it was you know, it was probably week one working at the firm. And I was very lucky because the founding partners of the firm were still here. And one of them sat me down and he said, you know, and he was on the land side of things. So we had different practices. But he said, I have to tell you, the one thing you have to do in every case is know your property. And he relayed a story of he had been in a board hearing on the land side of things. You know, you appear in front of local government bodies and you may have been working on a redevelopment for years on behalf of the client. The client has spent, you know, a lot of money, a lot of time, as have you. And the local government officials started asking this gentleman some questions, and they weren't hard questions, but they were a little bit you know, they weren't necessarily on the piece of paper in front of him. They were about the property. And it just became very obvious. And he had to eventually admit that he had never seen the piece of property he had been working on. And, you know, I can't say that I go visit every single piece of property, but I pull it up and I, I try and look and say, you know, what kind of - are there unique characteristics of this property I should be aware of off the bat? Because it's so easy to kind of fall into a rhythm of, ‘This is what I did on the last deal.’ But what we really need to be is adaptable and every piece of property is different.

Brain Maughan: Has there been a time that you remember where maybe that advice paid off in spades? Like where? Because you did the study, because you either visited it or you hit Google Maps like you knew a little bit more about that property that put would the document in the deal kind of more in context?

Antonia Miler: Yeah. I mean, I think recently I was working on a pretty big redevelopment of a, um…what we're seeing a lot of in kind of urban areas or this urban area, I should at least say is, you know, freestanding churches that are on, you know, big parcels of land in kind of metropolitan areas are kind of thinking about their future and what that what that looks like. And so what that has kind of lent itself to, at least in several deals I've been involved in, is that maybe they're going to sell their ground and there's going to be a larger building constructed on the property and they're going to have a unit within that building for their church purposes. And I was working on a piece of property in a very urban area of Northern Virginia, and it had a lot of intricacies - it had a lot of title intricacies, which is something I'm very interested in. But it had a lot of like physical, it had an alleyway, it had a small graveyard. And so the first thing I did before we started drafting the hundreds and hundreds of pages of documentation is go take a look at it, go take some pictures. And, you know, there were attorneys and, you know, you can't help where you're sitting, where your desk is compared to your piece of property. But their attorneys, you know, in other cities who a week before closing, had no concept of what the property looked like, what the project, the intended project was supposed to be. And, you know, I was really kind of able to fill in those gaps. And I think it certainly did help.

Brian Maughan: Was there any one specific part of that project that maybe could have been missed? If you, all you did was read the words, the alleyway, the graveyard? Was there a unique part of it that your visual, if you will, inspection helps you with?

Antonia Miller: So I think something I spend a lot of time doing is looking at title documents and land records and historical information related to, to a piece of property. And interestingly, in this church case, there was a covenant from, I believe, 1904 which said that there had to be this alleyway on the property. And, you know, if you think about 1904, obviously there are not metro buses, there aren't cars. So part of the analysis and looking at that and you know, when you're in an urban area, you don't have a lot of land to work with. So what does that mean? If an alley was established in 1904, we're sitting here in, you know, 2021 or 2022. How big does that alley have to be? Does it have to be paved? Does it have to be able to accommodate vehicles? So that was a piece of the puzzle that, you know, my client wanted to build their building, and they wanted me to work out some of these kind of underlying issues.

Brian Maughan: So how did you solve it? Was it a Metro bus or was it just an alleyway that someone had to walk through with a wagon?

Antonia Miller: It could be an unpaved alleyway. And we kind of looked at the characteristics. You know, the alleyway went through two adjacent properties. What had the adjacent properties done? And it was something that we worked out with the title company. You know, they have to be able to ensure good title to the property. So we have to work with them and say, this is what we think this document means. This document was drafted in 1904. We're sitting here, you know, over 100 years later. And, you know, these are the implications. And that project actually had another really interesting kind of thing, you know, title issue to delve into. It had a covenant that the property could only be used for religious purposes. I think that covenant was a little later, probably in the 1950s. But what does a religious purpose mean now? Does that only mean church services? Could you have affordable housing meeting some sort of religious purpose? Could you have other kind of charitable activities meeting that requirement? So we had to actually go back to the governing body of the church at a very high level and kind of get clarification on the covenant so we could make sure that this development that our client was going to spend millions of dollars on. You know, there wouldn't be a technical issue that someone could raise.

Brian Maughan: I love it. It's like national treasure all over, right? Like, what are you going to find when you dig into those documents?

Antonia Miller: And I can tell you, the most interesting thing or the thing that is interesting but does raise red flags is when you see a lot of family members that used to own a single piece of piece of property, this isn't always the case, but it does raise my antenna because very often there are intra-family issues or feuds. And I actually had a case a few years ago where um, various members of a family had owned a very large parcel in Fairfax, which is a suburb of D.C. and one of the brothers, it appeared that there had been some sort of falling out, had kind of held on to this roadway, the underlying title to this roadway, kind of as a spite parcel so the rest of the property couldn't be developed. And years and years had passed. My client thought that they were buying this 12 acre piece of property to develop. Turns out the brother never conveyed away his interest in this one kind of alleyway that bisected the property. Our our client said, ‘you got to fix this - I got to be able to build my town homes.’ In that case, we had to actually hire a genealogist to find heirs of this family. And it really was a little bit of a mystery. And again, I think the role that we play is we have to focus on these details. And at the end of the day, we have to be able to say to our client, this is how we fix this. This is how we make sure you can move forward with your project. 

Brian Maughan: I love the fact that you're a problem solver. And I love the fact that, you know, documents properties, they're a puzzle. And you've gotta, you’ve gotta solve them. And the client, like you said, probably puts a lot of trust in you as the attorney to think about those details, right? But I’m interested - DC, We've talked a lot about the, the history behind kind of the area. But you're building buildings differently, you're redeveloping buildings differently than they originally were used for. I'm curious, in your experience being in the DC area, being in Northern Virginia, are we developing commercial real estate in a smart way?

Antonia Miller: I think we're trying and I think that we see a lot of efforts and I think we see a lot of developers kind of buying into some of the goals that local government is setting, such as affordable housing or, you know, if you are developing or redeveloping a piece of property, if there's a historical element on that piece of property, if there's an old building or actually, the church project, one of the church projects I worked on had a historical Tiffany's glass window. And although the church itself was no longer going to be there, they worked that Tiffany's window into the new design of this residential building. And they agreed with the locality that it would be available for viewing by the public. So kind of reimagining ways to preserve that historical element of some of our buildings. And then also think about kind of smart growth and…I think something really important about affordable housing, and this has been something that Northern Virginia has really been focused on recently and I do a lot of work in, is for so long we had these communities that were so expensive that a lot of the people who worked here could not live here. 

Brian narration: She says recently there’s been a lot more attention paid to solving that issue. And speaking of smart development, there’s another project her firm worked on during the last several years that involved re-thinking the huge shopping area Tyson’s Corner just outside DC… 

Antonia Miller: What does that look like? It has Metro access, but not a lot of people live there. How do we encourage a community where people live, work, they want to spend their evenings, and how do we redevelop it smartly such that people are using mass transit? People are, you know, we may not have a million traditional parks, but, you know what we can do? We can put parks on rooftops and we can have beer gardens on rooftops of buildings. And so we really got to - our firm got to take part in that planning effort and help clients as they kind of navigate this new city that was re-imagined. And you don't get that opportunity very often because a lot - most things are developed. But it was kind of a chance to almost start from scratch. What does a new development, live work development look like in you know, it was probably 2015, and forward. 

Brian Maughan: You fell into commercial real estate, if you will. But you're so passionate about it. I can see it. Right. I can hear it. You get excited about these things that I think are a little bit behind the scenes, behind, you know, backstage, if you will. How long have you been doing this?

Antonia Miller: So I've been doing this for about 11 years. And I really do like being able to, you know, drive down the street and point out projects I've worked on or our firm has worked on that are changing the landscape of where we live. I think something that I really internalized from day one was that, you know, in order to be able to serve clients in this community, I had to know the community. So that kind of fueled some of my especially when I started, some of my community service and, you know, taking active steps to really kind of get out in the community and not just stay in my little bubble of, you know, attorneys or people I would normally interact with, but trying to interact with others. And you know, I think that's an important thing. I think if you're going to work in a community, you should try and know it and understand it and really take that seriously. And I think it takes an affirmative steps to do - do so. 

Brian Maughan: Give me an idea of what you did or what you currently do to get to know your community.

Antonia Miller: Sure. So I worked with an organization called CASA. It's court appointed special advocates. And they are appointed by local courts when there is a domestic issue in a home. And you're not an attorney, you're just another set of eyes and ears, because judges kind of said that they felt in situations involving domestic issues, they needed more facts. They needed a picture of what the family, what the home looks like. So I volunteered for that organization for about three years. And I - the most amazing thing was my first case. The family lived probably three blocks from where I lived.  We likely would not have interacted, um, you know, our normal paths would not have crossed. And I went to their apartment many times and, you know, kind of developed a relationship with them. So I was really glad and took a lot from that experience. And it really made me think about, you know, things like affordable housing, public transportation, why, you know, some of us might take some of those things for granted, but why they are very important. 

And I also did a um, reading program for English as a second language children in a local elementary school near our office. Many of the people from our firm participated. And that was another experience where, I think…and in our world, I actually do think it's true that you do have to, in a lot of cases, kind of purposefully step outside your bubble. And I think if you don't do that, you're missing an opportunity.

Brian Maughan: Do you think that's helped you be a better attorney? 

Antonia Miller: I hope so. I mean, I think what I really strive to provide clients with is is problem solving. But also, you know, listening to what they're saying, listening to their problems and how do we address them…and also just being a member of the community in which I live, I mean, I take that I take that pretty seriously. I'm an outsider from a different state. So I wanted to, you know, kind of integrate myself as much as I could.

Brian Maughan: Have you found that the landscape and I don't mean the landscape of of the land, but the landscape of commercial real estate attorneys has changed in your time. Does it look different?

Antonia Miller: I think it is still largely male dominated. A little bit of an older crowd. But I think, you know, we are seeing some changes. And I do work with a lot of very capable women. And one thing, when I first moved to D.C. from law school, there was a - my law school had a group of women that were attorneys that met and kind of just talked about some of the challenges they faced or some of the successes they'd had, you know, as female attorneys. And one of the attorneys, she was a partner in a large law firm and she described how, there was a senior associate who had left her team fairly suddenly, and she was sitting in her office and one by one, each of the lower tiered male associates, knocked on her door and kind of made their case for why they should be put on the projects this person had been working on. They should be in this person's office. They should, you know, get a promotion. And although she had female associates on her team who she thought were just as capable, if not more capable in terms of abilities, they weren't knocking on her door. And I just took from that the importance of kind of self-advocacy and self-confidence. And we still in many ways are the minority. And I think it's important for female attorneys to kind of advocate for themselves and show up with the same self-confidence as some of their other colleagues.

Brian Maughan: 100%. I love that. And I think that's probably a good thing to do to remember for all of us. But certainly, you know, when you gain a voice, I think you gain opportunity.

I want to go back to when you view that professional woman running on the mall. I'm curious. Let's say that's you now. What advice do you give a young, impressionable student who's thinking about their future. What do you running on the mall look back on and tell your 13-year-old self?

Antonia Miller: One thing is, find something that you really are kind of passionate about to do, and that you're going to enjoy doing every day. I mean, I can't, you know, not every single thing you're going to work on, every project is going to be, you know, fun, but you need to enjoy your job. And I think that really shines through, and I think too the idea of kind of confidence and advocating for yourself. I do see a lot of people coming out of school. I know they're young. And I think confidence does come with age and experience. But I also try and tell some of the young associates that work for me, you know, we hired you because you have an impressive resume. You're smart, you've been successful. There's no reason that shouldn't continue. So apply yourself and trust yourself. Have confidence in your abilities and your intelligence. And don't be afraid of a new assignment. Don't be afraid to try something new. And, you know, there's something to be said for if a new project comes in the door and someone reaches out to me affirmatively and says, I want to work on that, I haven't done anything like that, but I'm willing to learn and I'm willing to do some of the homework on my own and then meet with you to discuss it. So, I think having confidence in yourself and also being willing to kind of put in that extra time and not being afraid of something you haven't done. I think look at it as an opportunity. 

Brian Maughan: I love it. I love it. I used to live in Reston, Virginia, and my daughter was actually born in Falls Church. And we used to spend a lot of time in Great Falls National Park. Is there a part of the city that you've just fallen in love with?

Antonia Miller: I really, really love living near all of the national museums in the National Mall. I think that's so special, them being so accessible and free to the public. And I always enjoy when we have guests or visitors from out of town because I drag them with me to the museums. We have Teddy Roosevelt Island. Some of our outdoor memorials are just wonderful in the way they're kind of integrated into the city of D.C. It just makes the city so unique.

Brian Maughan: I get the sense that we are in good hands if you are part of shaping not only Northern Virginia and D.C., but also this world of commercial real estate. So it has been an absolute pleasure talking with you. Congratulations on what you've done and looking forward to what you will do. 

Antonia Miller: Thank you so much.

Brian narration: Thanks for listening to Season 2 of Built, we really hoped you’ve enjoyed it. We started this project with the intent of going behind the scenes and showcasing the people who play a huge role in building the world around us. 

And this season we got to peek into some important areas of commercial real estate, from affordable housing and environmentally friendly design…to what it takes to build a team that lasts decades. 

You’ve heard me say it before but we’d love to hear from you - we wanna know what you think of the show. You can email us at built@fnf.com. 

We’re excited to announce that we will be back soon with Season 3 with a slightly different twist into getting inside our built world. We can’t wait to share it with you.

Built is a co-production of Fidelity National Financial and PRX Productions. From FNF, our project is run by Annie Bardelas. At PRX, our team is producer Ashley Milne-Tyte, Senior Producer Genevieve Sponsler, and associate producer Courtney Fleurantin. Our editor is Isabel Hibbard. Audio mastering by Rebecca Seidel.

The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

I’m Brian Maughan.

Every story is unique, every property is individual, but we’re all part of this BUILT world.