Chris LaBianca and David Nass
Head of Commercial Mortgage Originations; Managing Director and Head of Real Estate Finance at UBS
Last year's rank: 41
One year made a big difference to UBS’s U.S. commercial real estate operation. A $2.2 billion difference, in fact. To the negative.
UBS did less than $800 million of originations in 2020, compared with $3 billion in 2019, and if you think the pandemic was the reason, you’re 100 percent right, said Christopher LaBianca. While competitors made it a point to maintain roughly the levels of volume they did in 2019, the Switzerland-based UBS, unlike its competitors, is not active in the multifamily space — which maintained its level of demand — and is active in the commercial mortgage-backed securities space, which dropped like a rock.
“The CMBS business basically shut down in March,’’ LaBianca said, “and it didn’t really become active again until the fourth quarter. That really hurt us. We focused much more on working with our existing clients. We played a lot of defense.”
The COVID crisis did more than just shut down UBS’ book of business. It also made the very business of banking — the traditional, normal means of doing business in corporate suites, conference rooms and at collateral sites — very hard to do in a climate of deep restriction on movement.
“My last day in the office was whatever that Monday was” in March, when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the lockdown, LaBianca said. “We said, ‘OK, nobody’s coming in tomorrow,’ and we haven’t been back since. And I don’t think UBS plans to bring people back to the office in a meaningful way probably till after Labor Day.”
What LaBianca and his team have been concentrating on has been client maintenance. Unlike many large banks, it avoided making margin calls and it continued to fund new assets.
It is also structuring and distributing transactions for its warehouse clients — in general, trying to be part of the solution for counterparties that suddenly faced revenue shortfalls as COVID inhibited behavior and spending.
The bank also provided more than $1.3 billion and counting of outstanding warehouse lines, LaBianca said.
UBS is expecting a robust recovery in its commercial mortgage business in 2021. LaBianca said they are shooting to originate some $3 billion in business this year. “We’re very bullish now,” he said. “There’s a lot of appetite. But transactions have definitely been slower. First-quarter volume was behind expectations. But we are certainly targeting 2019 models.”—D.L.
