Michael Magner and Andrew Taylor
Co-Heads of Real Estate & Hospitality, Americas at Natixis CIB Americas
Last year's rank: 31
Like many others, Natixis’ Americas Real Estate & Hospitality team paused early in the pandemic to evaluate where the market might be going.
“We took some time to collect our thoughts, collect market information, and try to find the road map to what we believed would be COVID-durable assets and markets that we could lend against,” Michael Magner said.
That road map led the way to roughly $1 billion in originations over the course of 2020, with the team focusing on areas where they believed cash flow would prove durable, like industrial, multifamily and self-storage.
Those transactions included $150.4 million in floating-rate financing to AGC Equity Partners to fund their acquisition of five industrial properties totaling some 2.9 million square feet across the Southeast; a $158 million refinancing of Post Brothers’ 320-unit, luxury high-rise, multifamily property The Duchess in North Bergen, N.J.; $69.5 million in financing to Camber Real Estate Partners for the Crossings Industrial Portfolio, a 25-building, 1.2 million-square-foot, light industrial portfolio situated across Bucks County, Penn., and southern New Jersey; and a $55.5 million floating-rate loan to StorageBlue for five New Jersey self-storage assets.
The COVID-driven road map reflected, in part, a shift in direction that predated the pandemic, Andrew Taylor noted.
“We had started to refine our origination program, even prior to the pandemic, to focus on smaller transactions and smaller markets,” he said. “So, the [COVID] transformation was reinforced by a lot of the secular trends toward moving away from the big metropolitan areas, and focusing on property types that would benefit from the kind of stay-at-home movement we see in lots of markets.”
Taylor said he and his colleagues see these trends continuing post-pandemic.
“There is still a reckoning coming about some of the major [central business district] office markets, and trying to figure out the appropriate sustainable rental rate and sustainable vacancy rate on that product,” he said. “On the flip side, there is this kind of unabated interest in smaller [metropolitan statistical areas], particularly Sun Belt MSAs and the self-storage, industrial distribution type of product that is maybe insufficiently available in those markets.
“That was a trend that was discernible beforehand and it has been amplified by COVID,” he added.—A.B.
