Katherine E. McComic is an associate in the Buchalter’s Real Estate practice group.

An agile, thoughtful, and collaborative real estate and land use attorney, Katherine builds upon her foundation in zoning, planning and development to advise and represent purchasers, sellers, lenders, and borrowers in real estate sales, leasing, and financing transactions.

A native of La Jolla, CA, Katherine moved east to attend Yale University, where she graduated with honors in 2014. She majored in persuasive writing and rhetoric, was inducted as a lifetime member of the Elizabethan Club of Yale (an exclusive literary society), and she was awarded a prestigious Yale College Fellowship to study neighborhood ecosystems in Madrid, Spain for a year after college.

After returning to the States, she opened a satellite office of a San Diego-based real estate development company in Napa, CA following the company’s purchase of a three-acre brownfield site. While in Napa, Katherine oversaw day-to-day pre-development planning operations, including lobbying the local Planning Commission and City Council to approve construction of a 51-unit condominium project, running due diligence on new acquisitions, coordinating RFP bids, and managing the company’s public relations with government officials and members of the press.

Wanting to learn more about the legal mechanics of land use and real estate transactions, Katherine obtained a full-tuition scholarship to attend law school at Quinnipiac University, where she divided her time between studying law and investigating economic development, real estate development, and land use policy in a familiar community, New Haven, CT.

In January 2019, at the start of her fourth semester of law school, Katherine was asked to provide leverage for the then newly-appointed Economic Development Administrator for the City of New Haven as his unofficial Chief of Staff. Between night classes and independent study projects for credit, she continued to be a full-time law student while working for the City. While with the City, she learned about agency decision-making, administrative procedure, public-private negotiations, strategic communications, and organization and people management in centralized hierarchical environments. During this time, she also became a semi-expert on how a city’s zoning code and housing code enforcement practices affect neighborhood design, affordable housing stock, and, ultimately, city budgets.

After graduating cum laude from law school in May 2020, Katherine began her practice as a real estate and land use attorney in San Diego, CA, designing land development permitting strategies for real estate development projects throughout California, which often involved multi-jurisdictional land use regulations. She assisted clients with project management, permitting, environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act, and project-related public affairs. She then moved into an in-house counsel role with tech-powered residential investment property company Pacaso, where she facilitated and closed transactions of co-owned real estate interests, reviewing transaction documents, iterating on sales flow design, negotiating deals, and aiding in the redesign of the company’s proprietary sales agreements.

A serial entrepreneur, Katherine has devised numerous empirical research projects to test and validate her assumptions about community development, policy making, innovations in housing and construction, and balancing the built environment with open spaces to meet climate goals. She is driven by an abiding desire to improve how people live—at home, in community, in cities, and in relation to each other and nature.

Professional Involvement

• Member, CA Lawyers Association, Real Property Law Section
• Member, CA Lawyers Association, Environmental Law Section
• Member, Urban Land Institute, Sacramento
• Member, American Farmland Trust
• Member, Energy Bar Association