P.J. Finley.
P.J. Finley, 26
Associate at CBRE
Of all the real estate players who exist in the industry, some just consistently bang out hit after hit. That’s true of James Millon and Tom Traynor’s debt and structured finance team at CBRE (CBRE), of which P.J. Finley is an integral part.
Even amid the pandemic, the team closed or came to market with several mammoth deals. They closed the $973 million construction loan for one of New York City’s most hotly anticipated projects, Oxford Properties and CPP investments’ St. John’s Terminal; they sealed a $500 million refinance for Brookfield Properties and Douglas Development’s 655 New York Avenue in Washington, D.C.; and their active debt assignments include a $400 million refinance for CIM’s 1440 Broadway.
“We’ve been fortunate to stay busy throughout the last six months, and I’d say most of that is due to our coverage model,” Finley said. “While we sit in New York, we’re also covering our clients wherever they go across the country and whatever asset classes they’re working on. So, while you have a slowdown in some asset classes and some geographies, some others — like the industrial space — have seen pickup.”
Finley graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2017, so the COVID-19-aggravated downturn is his first market crisis.
“I think what it has proven to me is that you’ve got to have a business plan that is valuable and be able to pivot when times get tough,” Finley said. “In terms of the financing side, and specific to what I work on, it’s really emphasized the importance of running a deep and thorough process on every deal.
“And so, in the case of some of these big deals that we had in the market, such as St. John’s Terminal, we ran a very thorough process and had many different lenders looking at it at the same time,” he added. “Because we kept them all engaged throughout the process, we were able to pivot from a scenario where only three lenders were going to fund it to having seven different lenders fund all at the same time.”
Finley always knew he was destined to work in real estate in some way, shape or form, although he didn’t know exactly where his landing point would be. His father is a homebuilder in the Philadelphia area, and he worked for subcontractors growing up in high school and college. After undertaking a project management internship for Turner Construction in Philadelphia, he had an opportunity to do an investment banking internship at Sandler O’Neill, and that’s when the puzzle pieces started to fit.
“I found the real estate finance industry to be the perfect meeting point between my investment banking, accounting and construction management experience,” Finley said.
And he couldn’t have found a more perfect landing spot than Millon and Traynor’s group at CBRE. “Tom and James create a culture in our team where the junior people are intimately tied to the success of the team,” Finley said. “That has really benefited my growth. It’s a role that I’m very grateful to be in for that reason and many other reasons.”
