Danielle Duenas.
Danielle Duenas
Vice president of originations at Mesa West Capital
Before the pandemic, it was hard to find a more competitive part of real estate than the debt markets, but Mesa West Capital has consistently been one of the most active and nimble competitors in the space.
Danielle Duenas has been with the firm for three years, and is responsible for the sourcing and origination of first mortgage debt for the acquisition, refinancing and/or recapitalization of properties in Southern California. In the past 12 months alone, she has underwritten approximately $1 billion in deals.
Born and raised in Santa Barbara, Calif., Duenas gravitated toward real estate because of its tangibility, and finance because she loved math. Her father is a contractor, and “seeing the transformation of buildings and how that can impact communities had an impact,” she said.
When she graduated from college in 2009, she — like several others — was faced with a less-than-active job market, but was lucky enough to land a job at City National Bank in L.A., where she worked for six years before moving to Mesa West.
“I’ve always worked in an up market, so I had no idea what to expect,” Duenas said of the COVID-19 experience. “I knew the world had changed overnight, but Mesa West started in 2004, and knowing our founders and the senior guys have a lot of that experience was very reassuring.”
As such, Duenas went into the lockdown knowing there would be a huge learning curve ahead of her, but also a unique opportunity to learn how deals are thought through during an unprecedented crisis.
“Mesa is a more conservative lender for being a debt fund,” she continued. “The market was insanely competitive going into this [pandemic]. We were bidding on some of the most competitive deals in the country, and just watching the lenders [bid] was like Shark Tank. There deals where we ended up saying, ‘OK, pencils down, this has gone too far and it’s not for us.’ We’ve always had that mindset of knowing our limits. Jeff [Friedman] and Mark [Zytko] have built a very successful company and our portfolio is very sound.”
In August 2019, Duenas originated an $88 million, five-year, floating-rate loan for the acquisition and lease-up of the new Sycamore Canyon, a one-million-square-foot industrial building in Riverside, one of the largest single-asset industrial acquisitions in Southern California in 2019. A joint venture led by Los Angeles-based Dedeaux Properties was the borrower.
Duenas is a voting member of the UCLA Real Estate Alumni Group Board and heads its Diversity Committee. She also sits on CREFC’s Women’s Network Membership Steering Committee and the USC Real Estate Forum Executive Board Planning Committee.
