Newmark Launches Loan Portfolio Solutions Practice to Meet Increasing Market Pressures
By Andrew Coen August 23, 2022 9:48 am
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Newmark’s newly launched loan portfolio solutions practice is seeking to capitalize on the brokerage’s firm’s increased push for banking clients the past few years at an opportune time amid choppy market conditions.
The platform, which was rolled out on Aug. 12 by the Newmark Valuation & Advisory (V&A) group, is the culmination of a large jump in institutional clients it has seen the past five years with the portfolio valuation business more than doubling in revenue between 2020 and 2021 alone. John Busi, president of V&A, said more than 20 percent of its business is now driven by the portfolio side, a large increase from when he first took over the group in late 2016.
“This was a natural segway for us,” said Busi, who prior to arriving at Newmark headed up the V & A global practice at Cushman & Wakefield. “The market is starting to shift a little bit with interest rates rising and inflation is a little bit of a headwind for us right now so our reality is we want to really get in further with the big institutional clients that we’ve been doing business with and this is a different kind of service that we can offer them”
Busi tapped his former C&W colleague David Risdon as practice leader for the loan portfolio solutions group. Risdon was previously practice lead for banking & regulatory solutions within C&W V & A for seven years.
Joining Risdon in leading the group are executive vice presidents Joseph Posavec and David Wolter, who also arrived from C&W.
The loan portfolio solutions practice marks Newmark V&A’s fifth business line to go along with valuation/portfolio valuation, alternative valuation, financial reporting and property tax.
“In times like these when you may be facing some credit deterioration the banks want to get ahead of the regulators,” said Risdon, who is based in Tampa, Fla. “So it’s the perfect time for us to come in and help review the credit portfolio, look at the assets, the loan to value, the credit, strength, the credit rating and help the bank start to understand where their reserves may need to be set to deal with what’s coming next.”
The new loan portfolio solutions practice also specializes in advisory work on environmental risks and flood compliance reviews for CRE portfolios. Risdon said regulators are more focused than ever on banks adhering with commercial flood compliance and making sure their borrowers have adequate insurance for CRE properties.
While rising interest rates present plenty of unknowns for the CRE market, he is confident banks will be zeroing in more on mitigating risk by more closely examining their portfolios with increased stress testing. Busi said Newmark V&A’s depth and experience has aided in its quest to grow its portfolio business while also positioning it for this growth opportunity. “
“When we left all the places that we left to join Newmark, Cushman & Wakefield, CBRE (CBRE), Colliers (CIGI), all the big firms, we were all working with a lot of institutional clients, a lot of bank clients,” Busi said. “We reconnected in the years following our arrival at Newmark and started to build back our relationships under the Newmark brand and then started to come together as really an amalgam of all these different folks from all these different places. We grew in stature, grew with confidence and we started to do more portfolio business.”
Andrew Coen can be reached at acoen@commercialobserver.com.
