Nomura’s New Head of CMBS, Larry Kravetz, Has Big Plans for the Platform

It’s been more than a quarter-century since Nomura Securities exited the real estate finance business. Once the top commercial mortgage lender in the U.S. and a pioneer in the commercial mortgage-backed securities space, the firm got out of the sector it helped trailblaze in 1998 after global market upheaval led to significant losses at the firm. 

Since then, Nomura’s myriad successful other structured finance products, including residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS), asset-backed securities (ABS) and collateralized loan obligations (CLOs), have continued to thrive, but now — finally — CRE lending and CMBS is back at Nomura. And, it’s back with a particularly big bang, as the platform is being led by one of the most highly revered teams in the business. 

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Larry Kravetz, an industry veteran who was head of CMBS finance at Barclays until recently, is now at the helm of Nomura’s re-entry into CRE lending. He’s bringing with him Barclays colleagues Francis Gilhool, Andy DiPietro, Mike Fedorochko, Luke Power, Adam Scotto and Pete Taylor.

If you work in commercial real estate finance, there’s an implicit fascination with the OG Wall Street firms that helped craft what lending is today — especially one such as Nomura, whose time dominating the market in the `90s was short, but whose legacy is significant. After all, it was Nomura that introduced CMBS “MegaDeals” to the market, completing the first securitization of pooled, large, mostly floating-rate commercial mortgages in 1994. In the process, it introduced a brand-new and substantial source of liquidity to commercial real estate, and the potential for financing assets was forever changed. 

In simple terms, CMBS began at Nomura. 

 As such, “there’s definitely a certain mystique about Nomura,” Kravetz said. “People are very pumped up about our move, and what we’re going to build here.” 

Brothers in arms

While Kravetz’s next chapter is new, it’s not entirely unfamiliar. In his role as head of CRE and CMBS at Nomura, he’ll be working alongside Gordon Sweely, global head of securitized products and private credit at the firm. Sweely is another industry veteran and, as a former colleague of Kravetz’s, no stranger. 

The two worked at Lehman Brothers, their tenures overlapping for eight years in the early aughts. (“Gordon was 4, and I was 6 at the time,” Kravetz joked.)  Both left in 2008 when Lehman became a casualty of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and three years later Kravetz would go to Barclays, and Sweely to Nomura. 

In the vast fallout of the GFC, Sweely was tasked with restarting Nomura’s structured finance business when he arrived at Nomura in 2011. Restarting the commercial lending business was on the list of goals for the company at the time, but the opportunity was simply bigger elsewhere. 

“We were designing what we thought made sense from a business practice perspective,” Sweely said. “The challenge at that point was that we were growing from basically zero, and the residential market was in so much more disarray than the commercial market that the opportunity was just bigger for us there. So, that’s where we focused.” 

Like an itch that won’t go away, over the years, Nomura has revisited restarting CRE “multiple times,” Sweely said. “There were definitely various entry points over the years that we might have jumped back in.” (Indeed, Sweely recently found a presentation from 2015, where his team was essentially asking, “Is now the time for us to re-enter the market?”)  

But while the intention was always there, there was one critical missing factor: the right person to lead it. 

“This is the very first time that I could get the quality team I needed — a team that has the same risk acumen, a very good reputation, and one we thought we could really build a franchise around. It all rested on us bringing in the right people,”  Sweely said of hiring Kravetz and his team.

Sweely was answering a plea from clients in the process. Nomura has an impressively deep reach into much of the structured finance space, but the absence of a commercial real estate-focused lending business in that mix has been “pretty glaring,” he said. 

After all, the franchise Kravetz and his team will be joining is significant. In 2024 alone, Nomura did roughly $56 billion in aggregate deal volume across 155 deals in other securtitized products including RMBS and ABS, and has racked up $54 billion in deals so far in 2025. On the CLO side it closed $30 billion in transactions across 60 deals, with $20 billion closed this year alone. Phew. 

“The reality was, I’m very reliant at this point — based on the size of our business and its evolution — on our  business line leaders. We expect [CRE lending] to be one of our biggest business lines,” Sweely said. “With that comes a lot of responsibility, and I just wasn’t comfortable with people that we had talked to up to this point, so it continued on. But, finally, we’re here.” 

After 14 years at Barclays, a big part of Kravetz’s draw to his new shop actually harkens back to his Lehman Brothers days. 

“Gordon isn’t the only person at Nomura who has a Lehman background,” he said.  “There’s a surprisingly high number of Lehman alumni here, and that DNA was an important part for me. I wasn’t looking to just plug into a place where I didn’t know the people or the culture, especially at this stage of my career.” 

That’s not the only full-circle moment for Kravetz as he enters his new chapter. When he was starting Lehman’s large loan business in 1995, part of his role was figuring out what Nomura was doing with its CMBS MegaDeals as the space was taking commercial real estate by storm. That endeavour would ultimately teach Kravetz how to establish and build a CMBS business.

When Kravetz  joined Barclays in 2011, he launched another CMBS business, and a trend started  to emerge. “Barclays’ CMBS business was shut down at the time. It was completely mothballed,” Kravetz said. “They were looking to restart the whole business, and I really enjoy doing that. I’m not an entrepreneur, but I’m someone who enjoys the challenge and the excitement of being able to build a business within a franchise.” 

The fact that Nomura had already established a name and infrastructure across other securitized product classes was another draw.

“It wasn’t like, ‘This is a startup’ or ‘We don’t really have capital markets.’ It’s a phenomenal franchise. Building this business is a logical next step for them — and with everything they have in place already, a logical next step for me,” Kravetz said.

The last time Kravetz started a lending business was a very different time, of course., and, just as in 2011, 2025 has its unique market challenges to navigate. 

“No matter what the market environment is, there are always going to be big challenges,” he said. “Things are only truly more difficult or less difficult in hindsight. With the benefit of hindsight we know that in 2011 the market was much less deep. We were just coming into CMBS 2.0, and no one knew what a data center was. We were reinventing the industry, although there were only a handful of people in it, so there was less competition. There was less liquidity in the market for competition. It was just a smaller market back then in terms of activity, and, frankly, less sophisticated.” 

Today, there’s definitely more there.  

“You can easily look at the market and say, ‘It’s a deep market but do they really need another player in CMBS? Do they really need another lender?’ ” Kravetz said. “But, again, this isn’t a trade. This is a business that we’re building together, and it’s an incredibly exciting time in the market for that.”

It’s clear 2025 is undoubtedly shaping up to be a big year for CMBS. However, investment sales and M&A activity — critical catalysts for further activity — haven’t fully returned, which means activity remains on the cusp of its potential. 

“From the perspective of that timeline, it’s a terrific time to come in,” Kravetz said. “It’s such a dynamic environment in terms of who’s lending and how they’re lending. Everybody’s a competitor, and the dynamic nature of it is really exciting.”

Getting down to business

While you’re reading this, Kravetz and his team are busy building out a full-service CMBS and balance sheet business. Nomura will soon have its own — yet to be named — shelf,  secondary trading, and research. It will be a significant player on both the conduit and SASB sides, originate balance sheet loans to its important clients, and also have a CRE warehouse lending business (to be led by Gilhool, previously head of CRE warehouse finance at Barclays). 

In the capital stack, it’ll be looking at senior loans and a combination of senior and mezzanine loans (although it likely won’t be holding the mezz).

“This business is completely synergistic to our account base,” Sweely said. “I think what we’ve done differently, and what people expect from us, is we don’t try to do everything for everyone. We pick our spots very specifically, so in the residential real estate business, the CLO business, the infrastructure business, we’re very direct on where we think we can be successful for the client base and come up with creative solutions for them. That will carry over into Larry’s business, as well.” 

Commercial real estate waits for no man, and, despite them likely still figuring out key cards and where the bathroom is at 309 West 49th Street, Kravetz’s team is already quoting balance sheet loans today. 

Recent inbounds include an acquisition loan “north of $200 million” for an industrial property, Kravetz said, as well as some “fairly transitional” lending opportunities (“Gordon doesn’t know about those ones yet,” Kravetz joked). In terms of property types, Nomura will be lending across the CRE spectrum (yes, even office). 

Balance sheet loans and warehouse financing will be rolled out first, followed by conduit CMBS and then single asset, single-borrower (SASB)  CMBS.  

 “It’ll take longer to get the conduit piece in place because there are more components, and we are in the process of putting the plumbing in place to make sure we do it the right way, which takes a little bit longer,” Kravetz said. “By year end, we’ll have conduit loans. I don’t know if we’ll be in securitizations by then, but we should be in a position to start quoting them. Then SASB will come.”  

At Barclays, Kravetz and his team racked up $11.5 billion in transaction activity in 2024 alone, across SASB, conduit, balance sheet loans, warehouse and acquisition facilities. It was a key source of financing for the data center space, leading or co-leading 75 percent of data center SASBs since 2021, a charge that will continue at Nomura in conjunction with the firm’s infrastructure group’s data center activity. 

“We’ll look to add on to that, and also be the CMBS takeout for it. It’s a big priority for us,” Kravetz said. 

“Larry’s business will be a great complement because one of the things that’s come to light a lot more in the last few months than it did previously is power, and that’s where our infrastructure group plays a large role,” Sweely said. “Some of the biggest issues developers are facing today are interconnection through the power grid, and in Texas some of the data centers are even looking at building their own gas power plants — which is something that we’ve done as well. So this combination, I think, will be terrific. 

“Like any big trend, it gets hot really fast, and then people start to figure out what we’re lacking. And, frankly, what we’re lacking is the power grid right now to manage all the data center buildings that are going up.” 

‘The most important shot is the next one’

A lot happened in Kravetz’s 90 days on the sidelines before he joined Nomura. “Spreads certainly tightened, and there was about $20 billion of SASBs done during that time,” he laughed. 

For Sweely: “I couldn’t believe the calls we were getting from our client base, or how excited they were about Larry joining us. I mean, some people even sent us transactions.” 

The palpable fervour isn’t misplaced. Kravetz started his career at Chemical Bank in 1987 and has been a veritable force in commercial real estate lending ever since. He grew up in Peabody, Mass., a small town roughly 20 miles north of Boston. He comes from a blue-collar background, and neither of his parents went to college. His father owned a small factory when he was growing up, and during high school Kravetz  worked summers in different leather factories, something he remembers as “difficult work in difficult situations.” He had one goal as a teenager: to attend a good college and go from there. He attended Haverford College and earned a BA in economics before attending Harvard Business School, where he got his MBA in real estate and finance, so… mission accomplished. 

Sweely was born in Ccentral Pennsylvania and grew up in western New York. His father was an engineer and he had similar career aspirations, although life had different plans for him. At Lehman, he had a number of roles in the ABS space, giving him a broad appreciation for the business from trading to product banking, and also introducing him to Kravetz. 

When Sweely was asked if hiring Kravetz had always subconsciously been the ultimate goal as he considered re-entering the CMBS space, Kravetz piped up, “From the day he joined Nomura.” 

But while (as far as we know, at least) Kravetz wasn’t necessarily added to a vision board somewhere in Sweely’s office, as soon as Kravetz showed interest in joining Nomura everything fell into place, and the “someday” for a CRE lending business quickly became a “now.”

“We were incredibly excited, because we all know Larry’s reputation, the team’s reputation, and the shelf’s reputation,” Sweely said.  “We quickly started to model the business and make sure we understood what all the resourcing requirements were.” Given the personal relationship Sweely has with Kravetz and Gilhool, “I wanted to make sure that when they walked in the door there were no surprises and we were ready to do this, and the resources, talent, whatever that they needed, was here.” 

Kravetz, despite the giant task ahead of him, felt no fear or hesitation in making his decision, he said. 

“You only get so many chances to do something like this in your career,” he said. “And, you’ll remember this moment, and hopefully in a very happy way, in a successful way, for the rest of your career. The team will also have a unique sense of ownership of this business because they’re helping build it, and enjoy results that you don’t get when you just plug into something that’s been around for 15 years.” 

Not that it’s going to be smooth sailing, by any means, and Kravetz has warned his team of that. 

“I say to them, this is going to be maybe the hardest thing you’ll ever do and we have to be super motivated,” he said. “It’s never a straight line, so we’re going to have our disappointments and ‘Why didn’t we get on this deal?’ moments. When we start showing off our shelf, we’re going to have to convince people that we have the secondary trading and everything else that goes with it, but I’m confident we will. It’s a big undertaking, but it’s also incredibly energizing. The energy we’re feeling toward us right now is remarkable. It makes you want to get here every morning and just hit the ground running — and that’s what we’re doing.” 

There’s plenty of competition in the market today, but the need for capital is also keeping up with, if not exceeding, that competition. As such, Kravetz said he has a line of clients and major brokers eager to snag Nomura’s first CRE deal on the relaunched platform. 

“As much competition as there is, people want to work with people who they can trust, and I think we fit that need well,” Kravetz said. 

There’s also some crossover between Nomura’s clients on the RMBS lending side and the new CRE business, plenty of whom have picked up the phone to tell Kravtez and his team how happy they were to hear the news. 

“It was unbelievable,” Kravetz said. “These household names were saying, ‘These guys are great, they have a great franchise, we love the culture, we love working with them. We love you guys, and we can’t wait to have you guys there.’ When you make a move like this you obviously have to try to keep it as confidential as possible, so I wasn’t reaching out to clients and asking them their thoughts, but it was a phenomenal response. I get excited just talking about it.” 

The industry breathed a wee sigh of relief at the recent interest rate cut, and although plenty of uncertainty still remains, that’s not what worries Sweely today. 

“From a performance standpoint, when you look across structured finance assets in general — not just CRE but the residential side, infrastructure, everything CLO —  I think they’ve all outperformed relative to the uncertainty that we’ve had in the market,” he said. “If you go back even a little bit further, with the election, and then post-election, the market has really been pushing along from a business perspective. I think that the challenge from our perspective right now is that nobody can see that shiny, scary thing that’s going to trip us all up, so I’d say we’re cautiously optimistic about the market. That said, I think as you see cuts that gives us a little bit more wind in our sails, which gives us even a little bit more distance from something jumping up and biting us.” 

And, both Kravetz and Sweely have transacted through several cycles, crises and pockets of dislocation in their careers, so they don’t scare easily. 

“I look at the market as pre-Financial Crisis versus post-Financial Crisis,” Kravetz said. “In the past 15 years or so, the market has been remarkably resilient. There have been pockets of volatility, but it’s bounced back pretty quickly every time. The greatest way to manage risk is through velocity, and, I think, as an industry, we’re pretty darn good at that. At Barclays, we did the first conduit CMBS deal after COVID in May of 2020, so we were literally two months into the pandemic. The spreads were a lot wider, of course,  but we did it, and I think that’s one of the great things about CMBS — even with huge volatility, it usually doesn’t shut down.” 

As such, CMBS continues to prove itself to be a good source of liquidity for the industry, Kravetz said. 

“It gives people comfort that it’ll be there,” he said. “The regional banks pretty much shut down with the rate hikes, but around 20 percent of some of our deals were suburban office loans when the regional banks were no longer lending there, so I think it’s a good demonstration of the liquidity CMBS provides.” 

Sweely finished his former — and current — colleague’s thought. “We’ve seen how the market reacts and what we need to do under those types of conditions, whether it be as lenders, as sellers of product, or as syndicators of products,” Sweely said. “As Larry said, one of the things that’s top of mind is keeping that velocity on our balance sheet, so that there aren’t things that are [loans] that have been hanging around too long, because those are generally the ones when you have volatility that turn out to be the worst. So we’re very diligent about trying to keep velocity up.” 

As Kravetz and his team go about building their new business, the criticality of the relationship element of commercial real estate is something they’ve mastered over the years, and a major component of their approach today.

“A big part of this business is how you conduct yourself in the process of winning and then closing loans and executing them,” Kravetz said. “We’ve created a pretty good formula in the past and will replicate that here. I think it’s important to be transparent with your clients throughout the process, because there will be ups and downs, but communication is key.” 

Again, the approach is also a continuation of what Sweely has put in place in the other business lines at Nomura, the DNA he and Kravetz share being obvious. 

“We want to be one of the top in this business just like we are in the other businesses, and our strategy will be the same,” Sweely said. “Where we can make a difference for the clients  — which comes from our people — is how we drive a lot of our success. We’re excited to get started.” 

Cathy Cunningham can be reached at ccunningham@commercialobserver.com.