Clockwise from top left: Grant Frankel, Philip McKnight, Nicholas Seidenberg, and James Muhlfeld.
Grant Frankel, Philip McKnight, James Muhlfeld and Nicholas Seidenberg
Managing directors at Eastdil Secured
Last year's rank: 18
Across the company, Eastdil Secured arranged a whopping $38 billion in debt placement, loan sales and structured finance for its CRE book in 2023. At the forefront of the effort is a four-person machine of Grant Frankel, Philip McKnight, James Muhlfeld and Nicholas Seidenberg.
Deal highlights included a $120 million recapitalization for a trophy office property at 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., a deal that used a structured joint-venture equity investment to pay off existing debt and allowed the sponsor to remain in the game; and Park 151 in Cambridge, Mass., a $200 million, five-year, partial cash-out financing on a 468-unit multifamily project.
“Obviously, 2023 was a year in which the CMBS market was relatively quiet, so it just took leveraging our global relationships with these banks, proactively reaching out to them, sourcing opportunities, walking them through those deals and really being our clients’ advocate,” explained Seidenberg.
Last year, the brokerage team leaned into balance sheet lenders — with over 80 percent of financings placed in that realm — and prioritized refinancings (85 percent of all transactions), with 20 percent of that deal volume falling under construction lending. The team’s preponderance in arranging construction loans was a deliberate approach to working through a difficult market beset by liquidity pullback and rising interest rates, but still in need of capital solutions for projects already underway.
“Even in a market that was challenging from an interest rate environment and costs going up, we were focused on supporting our clients that were looking to build and deliver in a supply-constrained market,” said Frankel.
No deal better illustrated this win-win approach than the $250 million refinancing to take out construction debt at the 314-unit Thompson Hotel in Austin, Tex. — a deal that required the partnership of several institutional investors to close.
“In a volatile market, there were many of our sponsors who felt the right choice for them was to hold onto the assets, but they were coming to the end of a construction loan,” said McKnight. The Thompson Hotel, he said, “is the perfect example of taking out construction financing and getting new financing and new terms.”
The group always seemed to know who to tap, a result of a strategy that left no balance sheet lender out in the cold, no matter if one deal didn’t work out.
“If we know X lender was a backup bid on an apartment deal in San Francisco, then we slot them for an apartment deal in New York City,” said Seidenberg. “The ability for us to work as one team and share information lets us tap a lot of different sources of capital and prime them for financing opportunities.”
