Joseph Lieske.
Joseph Lieske, 27
Director of debt and structured finance at Cushman & Wakefield
From 30 Hudson Yards to the landmark Coca-Cola building, Joseph Lieske has worked on financing for some of Gotham’s most notable properties, with $8.7 billion of career financings closed to date. But that is a bit of surprise, even to him. After all, Lieske said he always thought he would work on the development side of the real estate business.
“My dad was a construction defect litigator,” the Orange County native said. “I was introduced to the industry at a young age, and I thought development sounded really cool.”
He planned on studying real estate at Ohio State University, but soon discovered that he was more attracted to finance. As such, “I tailored the rest of education more toward the finance side,” he said.
In college, he scored internships at Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group in New York and TwinRock Partners, a private equity firm in Newport Beach, Calif. After graduation, he joined Deutsche Bank’s CMBS group in Los Angeles. Four years later, he joined Cushman & Wakefield (CWK) in 2018, where he worked his way up the ranks to his current director of debt and structured finance role.
Recently, he helped broker a $415 million CMBS loan for Blackstone’s select service hotel portfolio that was secured by 27 select service hotels around the country. “That was an awesome deal because it really allowed me to leverage my experience as a CMBS lender,” he said.
Lieske said that one of his favorite parts of the job is working with big institutional sponsors and clients across the country, allowing him to see different product types and markets. For him, that could mean a $1.43 billion acquisition financing deal on behalf of Related Companies for a sale-leaseback at 30 Hudson Yards, or securing $725 million in financing for the Nightingale Group’s acquisition of 711 Fifth Avenue.
“It allows me to touch on a lot of cool industries,” Lieske said of his role. “Seeing the world change in real time and how that relates back to real estate is pretty exciting.”
