Andrew McDonald and Rob Rubano, Cushman & Wakefield
Andrew McDonald and Rob Rubano
CEO of the Americas; and executive managing director at Cushman & Wakefield
Where to begin with the deals Cushman & Wakefield’s Rob Rubano has been tackling during COVID-19 out of the firm’s Los Angeles office?
“It’s all over the country,” said Rubano, who splits his time between transactions in California and elsewhere across the U.S. He’s had a condo inventory loan in Manhattan’s Tribeca; a hotel deal in Chicago; and other deals in Texas, Portland, Seattle and Miami.
In early September, Cushman & Wakefield announced that a team led by Rubano facilitated the closing of a $190 million loan from CIM Group to refinance Taconic’s Class A office development International Plaza, which comprises two buildings spanning 780,000 square feet located just north of Dallas.
About a month later, a Rubano-led Cushman cohort nabbed a $125 million refinance from Royal Bank of Canada for Tishman Speyer’s creative office building at 55 Aviation Boulevard in L.A.’s El Segundo neighborhood.
Also soon to pour out of the spigot for Rubano and his team is a large, spec office construction loan in Sunnyvale, Calif.; a multifamily acquisition financing in L.A.; a floating rate deal for a creative office transition in Southern California; a fully-leased, industrial deal on the West Coast; a loan on a pre-stabilized, multifamily asset in Portland; a transitional loan on an office in Austin; and a batch of industrial deals in Phoenix and Texas. These are among the 31 active deals Rubano and his team are currently spearheading.
Considering the number of deals his team has closed, and are in the process of closing, across every asset class for large, institutional clients, Rubano isn’t one to subscribe to the idea that the capital markets are moving slowly or slightly deflated at this stage of the pandemic.
“There’s a ton of liquidity in the debt markets,” Rubano said, adding that he’s seen increased interest from life companies as they’ve been “behind on allocations on their general accounts. Most big, life companies haven’t made up that ground yet, so they have an appetite through the rest of the year.”
He added that, while major banks have been the slowest to recover and regain ground, the commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) market has been “firing on all cylinders.”
“There’s significant bond buyer appetite at the AAA level and all subordinate levels as well, because people need yield,” Rubano added. “More recently, the large-loan, single-asset, single-borrower [area] has steadily recovered and there’s significant appetite there as well.”
Outside of the realm of traditional lenders, he said the “debt fund space is deep. That market — like everything else — sat on its hands post-COVID, but there’s been more conviction as [firms] have [regained the] ability to finance themselves on warehouse and repo lines. We’re seeing significant spread compression on asset classes, but the least compression with hotels. Week by week, the debt fund guys are starting to dip into hotels.”
C&W’s L.A.-based office is humming along, having hardly skipped a beat. In July, the outpost saw veteran Andrew McDonald elevated to a role as C&W’s CEO of the Americas. McDonald, who has decades of industry experience, previously served as C&W’s president of the west region, where he oversaw activity in California, Texas, Colorado, Arizona, Washington, Oregon, Nevada and Utah.—M.B.
