Bill Powell (clockwise from top left), Nailah Flake, Karan Nayar, and Zachary Cohn.
Bill Powell, Nailah Flake, Zachary Cohn, Karan Nayar
Managing partners; managing director at Brookfield Real Estate Credit
Last year's rank: 36
With a heavy emphasis on select asset classes, Brookfield Real Estate Credit saw an origination volume bump in 2024 despite facing industry-wide market headwinds for much of the year.
Brookfield’s lending arm executed $5 billion of loan volume globally in 2024 with a concentration in the housing, industrial and hospitality sectors. The credit side of Brookfield’s business has benefited from the company’s focus on equities, according to Managing Director Karan Nayar.
“The origination is a reflection of how we’re expressing our opinion in the equity business as it lines up well with how we’re investing,” Nayar said. “Everything tends to come back to where we have an information advantage over the market and where we see real relative value in an elevated interest rate environment.”
Brookfield’s notable transactions over the last year included a $484 million loan to a joint venture between Phase 3 Real Estate Partners and Bain Capital Real Estate to refinance the Genesis Marina life sciences campus facility in Brisbane, Calif., overlooking San Francisco Bay. Brookfield also supplied a $420 million loan to finance construction of Howard Hughes’ planned luxury condominium development in Honolulu.
Its active past year also involved, too, the discounted acquisition in December of $934 million of a Valley National Bank loan portfolio.
Nailah Flake, who has been with Brookfield Real Estate Credit since 2017, attributes much of the platform’s growth to its fundraising efforts for areas such as insurance capital and separately managed accounts.
“We’re continuing to focus on our debt funds, but the growth of the business is really coming from our insurance capital as well as capital-raising efforts and partnerships that we’re creating with third parties, and separately managed accounts that we’re managing,” Flake said.
“What that has done is provided our debt business the ability to participate in a wider variety of deals, playing up and down the capital stack,” she said.
