Adam Spengler, 32
Vice president at CBRE
As part of the large loans and debt and structured finance advisory group at CBRE, Adam Spengler sits at 200 Park Avenue next to Grand Central Terminal, where he and a tight-knit group of commercial real estate experts assess a diverse pipeline of deals and capital stacks that stretch across the nation.
“We focus on the New York region, but we’re geographically and asset-class agnostic,” Spengler said. “Wherever capital is going, we’re going to follow it.”
His clients include Blackstone, Tishman Speyer and KKR. His deals have ranged from brokering the development of life sciences properties in South Dakota and a large-scale multifamily recapitalization in the Sun Belt to servicing a ground-up, $300 million construction loan in Jersey City, N.J.
“Our team is a special forces unit,” he said. “We get brought in to handle deals of all sorts of sizes, complexities and structures, and that’s what I love about our side of the business.”
Spengler spent his first years in the industry on the lending side. But he felt that style of dealmaking, and the pool of loans available to service, carried limitations that the brokerage world never fell victim to.
“On the brokerage side, the options are limitless,” he said. “We’re doing everything from life sciences to data centers to office to multifamily to retail and everything of every size.”
Spengler captained the men’s basketball team at Johns Hopkins University, from which he graduated in 2013. His leadership qualities have come in handy at CBRE’s global debt advisory group, a 10-person operation founded by Thomas Traynor and James Millon, a pair of Deutsche Bank alums who’ve created one of the top-performing teams in the CRE brokerage space.
“On this team, we’re all former lenders, so we know what we’re selling,” explained Spengler. “So, if you’re going to talk to a client, if you haven’t been on the debt side and sat on the credit committee, you’re almost doing them a disservice.
“Lot of teams at CBRE are specific to one region,” he added, “but nationwide we do everything and anything.”
