Powell Robinson IV, 30

Powell Robinson’s first two internships were on a New York City trading floor and at a Greenwich, Conn.-based shopping center real estate investment trust. He loved the tangibility of real estate: “You can touch, feel, understand it; there’s a narrative,” he said. “As opposed to the name of the game in trading, which is get paper off your desk.”

Knowing he wanted to be in finance (his dad is a finance executive), he started at DekaBank in 2019. Headquartered in Frankfurt, the bank has 5,000 employees but just eight in New York — four for equity and four for debt. “My team, three of us debt originators, cover the entire U.S. $3 billion portfolio,” Robinson noted.

The team will generally do seven to 10 new originations a year totaling from $500 million to $1 billion. Most deals are in office, with industrial, hospitality and retail filling out the rest.

With such a focus on office, things were pretty quiet post-COVID for a couple of years. “When I would get a good quality office deal in, one that was beyond my ability to finance myself, I would dial someone in my Rolodex, and I would say the word ‘office,’ and the conversation would cease,” Robinson recalled.

The pipeline has recovered. “These days we’re comfortable around a hold amount of $100 million,” Robinson said. “If it’s an $85 million office financing, I can do that myself with the client.”

A larger deal would be last year’s refinancing of Brookfield’s One Liberty Plaza, a 2.3 million-square-foot Lower Manhattan office tower. “In the original deal, the total loan amount was $900 million,” said Robinson. The new loan amount is $750 million, with all 13 banks in the funding consortium having taken a pro-rata share of paydown.

Robinson is as passionate talking about the numbers as he is talking about the clients. “The most fun part of the job — the reason why after six years I still love what I do — is that there’s a real duality to it,” Robinson said. “Half the time I am behind a computer screen, figuring out how the numbers come together. The other half of the time I’m client-facing, I’m social.”