William Utnehmer is an attorney, developer and socially conscious entrepreneur. Mr. Utnehmer manages private equity investments and development of real estate assets focused on value-added opportunities. Along with real estate advisory, Utnehmer provides expert strategy, negotiation and resolution to a broad range of legal issues from simple real estate contracts and business disputes to complex litigation.

Most recently, Mr. Utnehmer has been focussing his practice on land use planning, transactional law and investments in the cannabis industry. He is recognized as one of the county’s foremost experts on the Sonoma County Cannabis Land Use Ordinance.

Mr. Utnehmer has been active in real estate since first moving to California from Wisconsin over twenty years ago. Utnehmer began his real estate career with Tishman Realty Corporation, one of the nation’s premier commercial real estate companies. Utnehmer subsequently founded and managed an award winning commercial and residential real estate development company with approximately two million square feet under management and an SEC Registered Investment Advisor platform for transacting portfolios of off-market bank assets. Mr. Utnehmer has extensive hands-on experience in acquiring, developing, financing and managing real estate within all asset classes. Mr. Utnehmer is also a founding principal of a Sonoma based solar company that engineers, installs, maintains and monitors solar systems for homes and businesses.

Mr. Utnehmer served as a member of the Counselors of Real Estate, University of Wisconsin Real Estate Alumni Association, Urban Land Institute, International Council of Shopping Centers, the U.S. Green Building Council and the Board of Trustees for the Westside Waldorf School where he was instrumental in the founding and development of its Pacific Palisades campus (see photos).  Credited as the real estate project for which Mr. Utnehmer is proudest, he was awarded the prestigious James Felt Award by the Counselors of Real Estate in Montreal for his stewardship of its development (see Press Release; read Bill Utnehmer’s speech).  Rudolf Steiner’s Waldorf education is recognized as the preeminent environmentally reverent, socially conscious pedagogy founded in 1920 in Dusseldorf, Germany. His projects have been awarded recognition by the American Institute of Architects for both design and environmental sustainability.

Mr. Utnehmer has been actively involved in various socially conscious ventures: environmentally sustainable real estate development through CW Development Partners; progressive education through his development of a Rudolf Steiner school based on social consciousness and environmental reverence; pro bono and bartered legal services through the Law Office of Wm Utnehmer; affordable and sustainable homeownership through 501 Capital, which provided a platform for funding non-profit housing organizations; homeowner mortgage relief through a foreclosure litigation settlement fund; clean energy development through his solar company; social entrepreneurship through Change the World, Inc., which uses proprietary technologies to provide an internet based platform for freely applying capitalist tools to socially conscious ventures and philanthropy; and Freie Immobilien Berlin, a treatise he authored for providing affordable home ownership to a broader socio-economic class in Berlin.

Mr. Utnehmer recently spent a year in Berlin, Germany working with the Freie Universitat Berlin developing their Entrepreneurship Program and lecturing on Real Estate Valuation in the Masters Program of the Department of Economics at Hochschule Anhalt, where Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus movement in 1918. Mr. Utnehmer was nominated as a U.S. liaison for Green Cross International, Mikhail Gorbachev’s humanitarian organization headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. Bill and his family moved to Sonoma to reside on a working biodynamic ranch raising grapes, olives, goats and chickens following principles of organic agricultural production, protecting biodiversity with integrated pest management, producing its own electricity with alternative energy, and implementing green building practices.