NewPoint Real Estate Capital’s Geri Borger Urgo: 5 Questions

Since joining NewPoint Real Estate Capital in 2021, Geri Borger Urgo — the company’s president of agency lending — has tripled the size of its agency and proprietary lending production teams, and helped grow the platform from $500 million to $6 billion.

NewPoint was established in 2021 through a joint venture acquisition of Barings Multifamily Capital by Meridian Capital Group and Barings, and Borger’s been there since the start. She recently sat down with Commercial Observer to discuss her career, her passion for the world of commercial real estate finance and more. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Commercial Observer: Can you give us the 411 on the start of your career?

Geri Borger Uugo: I currently sit as the president of agency lending at NewPoint. Prior to this, I was the head of production at NewPoint for the past four years. I spent 14 or 15 years at Freddie Mac, and what was neat about that experience is when I started, it was 2006 and we were a portfolio lender. They moved to their capital market space execution during the time I was there. 

I had briefly left Freddie in 2011 to work at a private real estate investment firm, where I learned more about the equity side of the house and what was driving deal decisions, versus my history in debt. I went back to Freddie in 2012, and the last job I held there was running East Coast production, and that was wild because that was during COVID. 

Freddie was such a great place to start a career. We did a couple of deals a week — and it was 2006, so you got a deal delivered to you via FedEx and had to upload things manually and go through the rent roll — but that pace really gets you into the nitty-gritty of deals.

What drew you to NewPoint Real Estate Capital?

It was 2021, and you had COVID coming out the wazoo, and I was viewed as someone who could come in and parlay all of my sponsor knowledge and technical knowledge into business growth and development management. I had other job offers that I was thinking through, but this was just the place that I thought I could help grow. 

What was intriguing about the NewPoint position was that Barings Multifamily Capital had a smaller platform and had only done maybe $500 million of business in the agency space the year we acquired them. But, it had great bones, it had really great team members, and then I thought, with the reinvigorated ownership, it was going to be an interesting opportunity. 

How did you help grow the platform from $500 million to $6 billion?

This industry is a people business. So, on one hand, I have a lot of borrower connectivity and sponsor connectivity from days at Freddie, and from just being authentically myself. But, really, I’m driven and detail-oriented and focused on the customer experience, and that led to tangible deals from those folks. Those relationships from my past have just continued to grow on this platform. 

Additionally, we’ve been able to recruit people and just really build a team. We’ve recruited originators that I worked with at Freddie, we got best-in-class underwriters and servicing professionals, and have really parlayed those personal connections as we are growing the firm.

We are a boutique firm that is able to give a best-in-class execution on a commoditized process. So I would put our execution up against any of the top five firms. Every deal matters when you’re smaller. A $50 million deal for me and for our firm is more impactful here than to the top guys. So just the attention level there, we get to be really best-in-class, and that has allowed us to grow responsibly. 

A lot of your past experience includes a variety of multifamily finance roles. How have you seen the multifamily market evolve over the course of your career, and what should the real estate market keep in mind when thinking about the broader multifamily market?

In terms of multifamily owner-operators, over the past two decades we’ve witnessed a shift from regionally geared players raising friends and family capital with an eye for longer-term holds, to institutional owners looking to amass national footprints, aggregating the platforms of these smaller players into their larger, national firms, while navigating acquisition and disposition timelines based on fund expirations and return thresholds. 

This shift propelled the popularity of floating-rate loans and shorter-term, fixed-rate loans with prepay flexibility over the more traditional 10-year, fixed-rate, agency loan. Concurrently, floating indexes are up, cap costs continue to be comparatively expensive and the favorable rent growth the industry has become used to seems to be tempering while expenses continue to put pressure on the bottom line. Going forward, I suspect lender exit metrics will be key, and investors with more patience and longer time frames will benefit.

What about from the perspective of new construction post-COVID?

Costs have risen far faster than rents and, as a result, the capital intensity of new development puts a purchase premium on existing properties, given the replacement cost advantage at play. The seemingly common premise of, “why build when I can buy a stabilized asset and not deal with construction and lease-up risk?” is pushing investor capital away from new development and toward stabilized assets. 

As a result, there seems to be a good bit of stalled development in major metro areas impacting supply-driven affordability metrics. A continued slow return to a more robust sales market has further exacerbated the issue. This has put a premium on the need to be agile and flexible from both a borrower and a lender standpoint — to be able to quickly execute or be open to alternative solutions and shifting strategy where an opportunity presents itself.   

Amanda Schiavo can be reached at aschiavo@commercialobserver.com.