CBRE’s Pat Arangio and Jack Howard Are Best Friends — and Two Loan Sales Titans

At 200 Park Avenue in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, inside the CBRE offices a few hundred feet high in the sky, a pair of commercial real estate professionals are quietly executing one of the most successful, and critical, operations in capital markets.

For the last two decades, Patrick Arangio and Jack Howard, vice chairman and vice president, respectively, of CBRE’s National Loan and Portfolio Sale Advisory practice, have been underwriting and advising complex sales of commercial mortgage loans and large real estate portfolios into the secondary market, where performing loans are traded like expensive NBA All Stars, and non-performing loans are gobbled up quickly by opportunistic investors.

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Their clients include the largest names in banking, private credit, mortgage real estate investment trusts and special servicing. In just the last 18 months, the pair have advised Deutsche Bank on a $1 billion loan portfolio sale, Blackstone on an $800 million portfolio resale of performing Signature Bank loans previously acquired, and CIBC on a $316 million portfolio of U.S. office loans secured by eight buildings in San Francisco, Seattle, Phoenix and Austin.

Arangio has generated $37 billion in loan sales to his name over 24 years, while Howard boasts $25 billion over 19 years, with this work sometimes overlapping. The duo have been working together since the late 2000s, and have been best friends for 23 years since meeting in Washington, D.C., during the summer of 2002, when one was an intern and the other just starting out.

Their productivity has remained opaque, misunderstood, and out of the public eye.

“Our business is typically you don’t see it, you don’t hear about it, because our clients don’t want it seen or talked about, because, even if we sell something above par, the view is if someone is selling loans, they’re probably in trouble,” explained John Howley, vice chairman at Newmark, who quarterbacked the $52 billion loan sale of Signature Bank’s commercial real estate portfolio after the 2023 regional banking crisis.

While Arangio and Howard — known as “Pat and Jack” to even the biggest of market movers — specialize in the sale and marketing of large real estate portfolios, they also coordinate the disposition of single assets, foreclosed assets, intricate Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) processes, and complex commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) conduit kickouts.

James Millon, president and co-head of CBRE’s U.S. and Canada capital markets business, said Arangio and Howard are successful because, unlike others in debt and structured finance (DSF) advisory, they have solely focused on loan sales for 20 years.

“I would say universally, in the marketplace, if you’re a bank or a lender, and you need to sell a position, and you only have one call, that phone call is going to Pat Arangio, and his partner, Jack Howard,” said Millon. “No question about it.”

If they’ve garnered this reputation across the market, it hasn’t been by accident. Arangio and Howard have both invariably outworked the competition, and impressed their rivals, often turning the other side of the deal into their clients by virtue of their execution of the sale at a price a buyer might not have expected to pay.

Andrew Mullin, global head of asset and portfolio management at Deutsche Bank, recalled how his bank had bought large loan portfolios through Pat and Jack over the years, and decided they had to work with them once Deutsche Bank needed to sell its own position in the most recent cycle.

“We were so impressed by how they ran that process, and kept us honest by trying to extract the most value out of us, that they were the right guys to use on the other side of the trade when we were selling,” said Mullin.

Their former boss, Chris Ludeman, who retired in 2024 as CBRE’s global president of capital markets, said the two have consistently outworked the advisory business competition, both internally and externally, for years.

“I’ve been around brokers my whole life, I’ve worked with countless numbers in leasing and sales, over many decades, and I don’t think I could identify a team that has consistently worked longer and harder at their trade than the two of them — period, full stop,” said Ludeman.

But, if you are to hear straight from the horses’ mouths, both Arangio and Howard seem surprised at how the greater CRE market views their businesses, as they’ve seen loan sales and multi-asset dispossessions go from being a niche segment, one typically powered by distress, into a strategic and tactical way for lenders to manage their portfolios more effectively in an era bookended by the Global Financial Crisis on one end and the post-COVID realignment on the other.

“Loans sales have always been an extraordinarily prudent mechanism for portfolio management, and when markets get volatile it becomes even more so,” said Arangio. “If you were going to be a legitimate participant and investor in commercial real estate [in the post-GFC world], you had to have the ability and aptitude to buy debt.”

Howard said that many of their lender clients now see the benefit to selling their positions early, prior to maturity, even in performing loan portfolios or assets that still carry a (temporarily) good basis.

“Sometimes you see lenders hold on too long, when borrowers aren’t in position to recapitalize, and often we advise lenders, ‘If this is something you’re thinking of selling, sooner might be better because if issues aren’t addressed the asset will continue to decline,’ ” he explained.

Performing loan sales are often facilitated by federally regulated institutions like banks and life insurance companies that are looking to grow, or shrink, their respective portfolios, often with each other, while non-performing loan sales buyers are usually private firms, family offices, or high-net-worth individuals, which have raised opportunistic capital solely for the purpose of buying distressed debt.

Howard said that in recent years, amid higher interest rates, liquidity pullbacks and tariff volatility, many submarkets have had more loan sales than traditional investment sales.

“If you’re raising money, and you can show investors you bought this loan at 65 cents of par, or 85 cents of par, mainstream investors like the idea of buying distressed assets,” he explained. “They can buy a non-performing loan, foreclose on it, or work something out with the borrower, and own the building at a new basis.”

Millon, who now oversees the pair’s office in New York, emphasized that a loan sale requires intimate knowledge of the asset’s value, the position of the loan relative to the marketplace, and the details of the loan documents, as well as the ability to grapple with large loan portfolios that typically stretch across borders and regions and have had existing structures for years.

“It’s very difficult to stand up a team that can sit across nationally and work across all our partners in every market,” said Millon. “Pat and Jack can do just about anything with debt and structured finance, but they have chosen to focus exclusively on loan sales, and that’s why they’re so important to us — because they’re the only team that focuses solely in that space.”

Humble beginnings

What’s even more remarkable about the scale of Pat and Jack’s business is where it started.

In 2002, Pat Arangio was a recent graduate of Cornell University, where he spent more time reading Fitzgerald and Hemingway as an English major than preparing for any sort of career in high finance.

But his father, a retired orthopedic surgeon, reminded his son that food, clothing and shelter are the perennial necessities of life. After a friend’s uncle offered him a job as an analyst at Cushman & Wakefield, Arangio jumped at the opportunity.

“It’s funny. I could read, I could write, and I could speak a little bit, and I had never taken a math class or a finance course — but numbers are kind of easy, and a ton of this business is communication,” recalled Arangio. “It just made sense to me.”

That same summer, Jack Howard, who still had his senior year at Clemson University to finish, met Arangio while interning one summer at Cushman, where he was focused on multi-
family investment sales. The two became immediate and lifelong friends.

“Neither of us had real estate in our family background, or really any history with it,” said Howard. “It’s sort of something we both individually had an attraction to and kind of both made our way to D.C. for.”

Newmark’s Howley worked at Cushman then with David Dorros, now a managing director at Eastdil Secured, and, as their loan sales practice grew, the two hired Arangio to handle the phones, where he spent three years working under them at 1801 K Street, a few blocks from the White House.

“We quickly learned he had the gift of a good sales person: very hands-on, very earnest and honest,” said Howley. “We had him work on loan sales, calling buyers, trying to sell paper, and we’d look at each other and said, ‘Holy smokes, he’s good.’ ”

As they settled into commercial real estate, Pat and Jack even got in on the action themselves: Together with a group of friends in their mid-20s, they bought a townhouse in D.C., which they kept as a rental for college kids spending their summers interning on Capitol Hill.

“I remember the broker, who we eventually hired to sell it, said, ‘I’m not listing this thing until you get it cleaned up, because there’s been a frat house in there for essentially 10 years,’ ” Howard said.

All the while, the two became increasingly comfortable in the nebulous world of single-asset and portfolio loan sales.

“The more I did loan sales, it almost felt like you had to be a little bit of everything, right? You had to learn real estate, but you had to really understand real estate credit, and then you also had to be kind of a junior economist,” said Arangio. “And you had to understand trends, because in some cases, we’re the canary and the coal mine.”

But the guys had other ideas than just sticking around D.C. They knew, intuitively, that to make it big in commercial real estate capital markets, they needed to be in New York City, and they needed to carve out a specialty practice that set their business line apart.

“I spoke with my dad and my mom about it, and just said, ‘We don’t want to be jacks of all trades and masters of none,’ ” recalled Arangio. “Like, if this thing was gonna work, if we were gonna grow it big, then we were going to do nothing but loan sales. That was it. And we were going to become practice leaders and subject matter experts.

“And I remember my dad was just like, ‘Well, you really need someone you can trust.’ ”

So, after three years at Cushman, Arangio broached the idea of moving to New York, following Dorros to CBRE, and creating a national loans sales practice at another firm with global reach.

“Jack was my best friend, we lived together, he was the most honest guy, and I almost felt like once I had him on board, we could kind of do whatever we wanted,” said Arangio. “Like, if we started selling widgets a week from now, with the team that we’d build, I think we would be good at it in a year.”

But selling loans is far harder than selling widgets, and Pat and Jack would learn firsthand how intense commercial real estate markets can become, especially when a once-in-a-century financial crisis hits.

Growing business

The thing about loan sales is it’s not a glory business.

“For those of us in this business for a long time, we don’t typically put stuff into the press — if stuff is written, it’s not by us,” said Newmark’s Howley. “If you’re selling $400 million of performing loans for Wells Fargo, and you’re getting par plus because of where rates are, if that shows up, the vultures and opportunity funds will think, ‘Wells Fargo is in trouble,’ and start calling and asking ‘Do you have crap we can buy?’”

The modern loan sales market emerged from the destruction of the 1980s and 1990s Savings & Loan Crisis, which required the creation of the federal Resolution Trust Corporation to sell off and unwind the tens of billions of dollars of commercial mortgages and other debts that insolvent S&Ls had issued for years. The first loans were bought at deep discounts, as no one knew how to mark the paper, but as the private sector sought to reduce its non-performing loan exposure, buyers swooped in to purchase the real estate at a discount, sometimes earning fortunes, while the performing loan sales market matured as more lenders viewed selling as a prudent portfolio management tool, rather than waiting until maturities hit.

It could cut two ways. If lenders wanted to flaunt lots of liquidity at high pricing, they could sell a performing, high-quality product. But, if they wanted to appeal to regulators or shareholders, they could sell challenged assets or non-performing portfolios. Either way, loan sales help reduce exposure to certain borrowers, markets or asset classes, but they can also be sold at lucrative premiums and generate huge returns.

“If it’s a loan that’s from an older era, from when interest rates are higher, you can sell an 8 percent fixed-coupon in a market where the interest rate for that same loan would be a 5 percent, you can trade that for 105 cents on the dollar,” said Arangio, who added that in down markets with more distress he sees loans often sold at a loss. “It’s all about optionality.”

Millon noted that what’s interesting about Pat and Jack’s business is that, unlike other DSF practitioners whose clients are sponsors and borrowers, their direct client base are lenders across an enormous secondary loan sales market. That market has grown even bigger since the birth of private credit, giving them the opportunity to benefit from both good and bad cycles.

“What’s not talked about enough about their business is you can sell loans in any market,” said Millon. “The market thinks when there’s distress, or liquidity is challenged, then there’s a spike in loan sales activity because lenders need to raise liquidity. And, while that’s true, Pat and Jack also sell loans in very good markets where lenders might want to take advantage of certain macroeconomic factors by trading loans above par.”

Howley described the typical loan sale as an exclusive undertaking often initiated by the seller, as the best loan sales brokers never take fliers on those just looking for pricing information. Once hired, a good loan sales broker strikes out wide across a database built over decades of phone calls and meetings, with sellers often directing them on which buyers to target.

“We all came out of the same shop, the Cushman shop,” said Howley. “We don’t use auctions, we use a sealed bid, we’re looking for investors to do their due diligence upfront, sign a loan sales agreement, put up a nonrefundable deposit, and close quickly.”

Boom times

Ironically, for Pat and Jack, after making the move to CBRE and New York in the late 2000s, they had a front-row seat to the financial world falling apart by October 2008 — and found themselves reaping the rewards from a market full of underwater assets and destroyed balance sheets that needed immediate repositioning.

“There was a really fruitful run for us in those post-GFC years, when the CMBS special servicers were working through all this bad debt that had accumulated,” said Howard. “That’s when we sort of came into our own in a different way, and the loan sales business, as a service line, matured and grew.”

By 2013, Arangio was promoted to vice chairman at age 34, and, with Howard by his side, the CBRE duo grew their team to 11 people, training numerous professionals on how to underwrite a huge wave of 10-year-old real estate debt that was issued prior to the financial crisis.

Through the second half of the 2010s, Pat and Jack were handling multibillion-dollar portfolios on an annual basis, mainly because the historically low interest rate environment made it accretive for large institutions to borrow enormous sums to buy large books of performing and non-performing loans.

And it’s not uncommon for them to underwrite the same loan or portfolio numerous times over several months or even years.

“Last year, we sold loans that we’d been looking at for two or three years on behalf of banks,” said Howard

In 2024, they completed $4 billion worth of loan sales, and the team expects that volume to continue as 2025 turns the page into 2026, largely due to the need of lenders to unwind distressed office debt.

More remarkable than their business acumen is their longevity. As Howley noted, many DSF brokers jumped into loan sales during the $52 billion Signature Bank auction, but just as soon left the practice to swim in the far less complex ponds of mortgage brokerage and equity financing.

“With loan sales, there’s probably three years where it’s good every decade, and the trick is to make a living the other seven years,” said Howley. “When you’re in loan sales, for the most part, the people doing it for a long time don’t do it for the glory, you do it to make a living.”

And, as they move into their third decade of doing business together, Pat and Jack plan to lean into the values and standards that have shaped their careers and allowed them to climb the competitive ranks of commercial real estate finance without sacrificing their integrity.

“The thing I appreciate from Jack — among a million other things, probably as much as anything, and this includes his loyalty, his honesty his good judgment — is he was never going to let us go in a way that was not how we had always wanted to be,” said Arangio. “He was never gonna let us do the things that we decided we would never do.”

Howard agreed the two are very well aligned ethically, and attributed it to their backgrounds growing up, specifically their fathers, on how they led by example in their own lives.

“My dad still runs a family business in Florida that’s over 100 years old, and I learned a lot from him on how to conduct myself and be a professional, and Pat had some of those similar experiences,” said Howard.

Aside from being straightforward and gracious with clients and team members alike, the duo were praised by Ludeman for their hard-nosed business tactics. “Down deep these guys are tigers — stone-cold killers,” he said. “But they are extraordinary human beings in the way they treat each other, their clients, and the people who work for them.”

Beyond their professional success, Pat and Jack have become more than the go-to experts in a complex practice — they’ve turned into brothers and family.

“We’re best friends,” said Howard. “Pat’s the godfather to my daughter. He named his son Jack.

“We’re very, very close,” he added, “and I think it’s somewhat unique in our business, as you don’t see too many teams with that kind of foundation.”

Brian Pascus can be reached at bpascus@commercialobserver.com.