CMBS Expert Mike Strug Leaves BlackRock to Join Stephen Muller’s Vanadium Group

One of the great connectors in commercial real estate has jumped from BlackRock to a lesser-known advisory shop that specializes in equity deals and major mixed-use projects. 

Mike Strug, founder of the Young Real Estate Professionals of New York (YREPNY), an informal networking group that has connected thousands of industry players since 2001, has left BlackRock after 14 years as a vice president of commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) analytics to join Vanadium Group. 

Vanadium Group is a six-person advisory firm founded in 2019 by Stephen Muller, formerly chief investment officer at Arris Properties Group and managing director at Greenwich Group International. The firm specializes primarily in equity — and some debt — brokerage, where it connects middle-market capital markets owner-operators and developers to the debt and equity needed to finish CRE projects or finance new ones. 

Strug, who began his 28-year CRE career in lending, told CO that as much as he loved working at BlackRock’s analytics arm, he wanted to get back into the nitty-gritty of deal flow. 

“I wanted to get back on the deal side,” he said. “We’re nimble, there’s only six of us here, I’ve known Steve Muller for 23 years … so it was the perfect fit for me to come over.”

Before joining BlackRock, Strug spent several years as a loan officer at IDB Bank, as an investment officer at Assurant, and as a senior originations associate at TIAA-CREF. 

Strug also said that the move over the Vanadium aids the position he holds as founder of YREPNY, which has met once a month in New York City for the past 24 years. That volunteer job has turned Strug into an in-demand guest speaker at colleges and “a pseudo-mentor for thousands of young professionals,” as he humbly describes himself. 

“It’s helped me expand my network over the years and give back,” he said. “And here, now, I’m able to leverage my network and help drive business for Vanadium Group.” 

Muller began his career 25 years ago underwriting deals at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, and has directed and overseen real estate investments worth exceeding $20 billion across different asset classes in multiple C-suite capacities. He told CO he was thrilled to find someone like Strug who can aid Vanadium’s underwriting through his decades of private equity CMBS analysis and his deep list of contacts forged from his monthly mentorship meetings. 

“We do a huge amount of the work, and to be able to find someone who has the kind of network like Mike’s, but who also has the intellectual horsepower, is not easy at all,” said Muller. “What I said to Mike was, ‘It’s not just your Rolodex that I view as an opportunity, but you were doing CMBS surveillance and writing private equity quality research materials.’ That’s not teachable.”

Muller is the first to admit that many in the industry might not have heard of Vanadium, which specializes in making markets for preferred equity pieces of limited partner equity, as well as advising large-scale mixed-use projects. Muller listed The Wharf is Washington, D.C. and Miami Worldcenter as among the biggest mixed-use projects he’s advised and underwritten. 

But it’s the equity space, rather than the burgeoning world of private credit, that Muller and Strug believe offers them the greatest opportunity to bring investors together, either directly or through syndication. 

“Probably 80 percent of our business is equity, as opposed to debt, and that in and of itself is very unique — most of the advisory firms are the other way around,” explained Muller. “There are very few true equity shops left in the industry.”

Moreover, Muller emphasized that Strug will help his firm build and grow its relationships with institutional equity groups like small to medium-size life insurance companies, pension funds and endowments, which often don’t have the ability to either syndicate equity originations in-house or create liquidity for their existing investments through the secondary market. 

“There are very few people like Mike who can truly speak the institutional language, have an incredible institutional Rolodex, but can also bring the entrepreneurial spirit that he brings,” said Muller. “He’s a natural-born entrepreneur and networker.” 

Brian Pascus can be reached at bpascus@commercialobserver.com.