Omar Ferreira.
Omar Ferreira, 33
Vice president at Meridian Capital Group
He may pound the sidewalks of New York City today, but Omar Ferreira grew up many miles from the Big Apple, in the mountainous Caribbean island of Dominica, coming to the U.S. to study at Baruch College.
“I always had an interest in real estate,” Ferreira said. “I was a poli[tical]-sci[ence] major, so initially I was going toward working on campaigns. That was my dream. But, when I realized how much of an impact the real estate industry has on the city, it pushed me toward exploring opportunities in real estate.”
Ferreira got his brokerage start at then-Massey Knakal in 2011, working alongside Morris Betesh, who is now also his colleague at Meridian Capital.
“When I started back in 2011, we were in an up market and it remained that way — thankfully — for nine years,” he said. “This crisis is my first experience of a down market and it’s been interesting to see how lenders are working with borrowers, particularly on hotel and retail assets. They’re working to find a solution for everyone.”
Ferreira’s Meridian team is generally focused on transitional deals. “Any deal where there’s a story to be told is one place where we’ve stood out, but I wouldn’t necessarily pigeonhole us to any one particular deal,” he said. “We do your standard [Acquisition, Development, Construction] deals, everything from a straight-up multifamily refi[nance] to your pre-TCO (temporary certificate of occupancy) construction takeout, which was a product that was very popular in the market in the last couple of years.”
To date, Ferreira has closed an impressive $2 billion in transactions, with another $400 million teed up in the pipeline. In August, he assisted in closing $187 million in financing for the ground-up construction of 2222 Market Street in Philadelphia, a built-to-suit Class A office tower spanning 305,000 square feet that is pre-leased to law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. The senior syndicate included Citizens Bank and Santander Bank, while ACORE Capital provided mezzanine debt and preferred equity.
Ferreira lives in the Financial District, mere steps from Meridian Capital’s office at One Battery Park Plaza, so he was one of the first to return to the brokerage behemoth’s office after the pandemic lockdown.
