Larry Kravetz, Steven Caldwell, Francis Gilhool and Kristin Khanna

They say a smooth sea never made a skilled mariner, and Barclays has a boatload of seasoned talent ready to handle whatever the choppy markets send its way 

“We’ve stayed open for business, and we think we’ve done a good job with it,” Larry Kravetz said, adding that “the market environment feels much stronger coming into 2024, and we’re very pleased with what we’ve been able to accomplish so far this year.”

The team closed $6.4 billion in transactions in the past year, and had much to celebrate across its diversified product offerings. Case in point: Despite conduit volume dropping significantly in 2023, Barclays held its own volume flat but increased its market share in the space from 6.5 to 8 percent. As five-year conduit programs thrived, Barclays launched its own shelf, BBCMS Mortgage Trust. Overall, the bank leaned into recession-resilient assets and opportunistically increased its exposure to the industrial sector and the hospitality sector.

It underwrote nine SASB transactions in the past 12 months, leading five and executing plenty of market firsts en route. Drum roll, please: The first SASB deal Digital Realty brought to the CMBS market; the first 1 Hotel-branded deal in the CMBS market for 1 Hotel Nashville; and the BX Commercial Mortgage Trust 2024-XL5 deal, collateralized by a portfolio of more than 100 assets. “At $2.35 billion, it was the largest SASB executed in two years,” Kravetz said of the XL5 deal. 

“In the past year, the SASB world had so many more bespoke solutions, as opposed to just five-year fixed or five-year float,” Steven Caldwell said. “We were going through all of the iterations with clients — some of whom were completely unfamiliar with CMBS. Our continuous connectivity with the market is really valuable in sharing the art of the possible, and bidding deals in this current environment has been way less about the tightest spread and more about the menu of options to deliver an optimal result.”

In terms of asset classes, office is the only one Barclays isn’t actively pursuing, and, at the other end of the spectrum, data centers are very much on the bank’s radar. “We were one of the lead banks in both the Cyrus One and the QTS Realty Trust privatizations, and we continue to work actively with those clients,” Kravetz said. “We’re expanding into doing construction lending there — which is something we don’t normally do — because data centers are a major growth area.”

They also built a “bridge” over troubled water, so to speak, with $7 billion of new bridge lending facilities established with clients to take advantage of anticipated opportune lending conditions in the next 18 months. 

On the acquisition facilities side, Barclays closed three sole-lead facilities totaling $760 million focused on lodging and industrial strategies, and a $360 million facility for a portfolio of hotels that required some seasoning post-renovation to achieve optimal execution in the capital markets.

“Some were with a different fund of an existing client, and we had one new facility with a new client, GLP, who were looking to grow in the U.S.,” Khanna said. “Last year, we had an opportunity to start our first balance sheet relationship with them, which we hope to grow into the securitization market as well.” 

“We have more new business in front of us than we’ve ever had,” Frank Gilhool said. “We have more existing clients and new clients than ever. We’re looking at the next 24 months as a crazy, exciting time to be doing what we’re doing — and the feedback from clients is what’s making it exciting for us.”