John Daniels, 34

John Daniels played midfield on the University of Dayton’s varsity soccer team, which prepared him for the collaboration necessary for his intricate, often sprawling finance work at Newmark, where he’s been for eight years.

“My favorite thing about what we do in loan sales is we’re national — we cover every asset class and we go throughout the entire capital stack,” Daniels said. “Because of that we are naturally reliant on our other service lines, be it leasing, capital markets, investment sales, debt and equity. So we often get to work with other teams within our organization.” 

That team ethos has come in handy at Newmark. Daniels was part of the months-long work behind the $53.5 billion structured sale for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation of a debt portfolio from the failed Signature Bank, most loans of which were tied up in commercial real estate. The deal has been billed as the largest loan sale in history.

Along with the FDIC, Daniels’s other clients have included J.P. Morgan Chase, CWCapital, KeyBank and John Hancock Life Insurance. He has been involved in approximately $60 billion in unpaid balance principal loans and real estate owned sales, according to Newmark. 

Daniels grew up in Bethesda, Md., the son of a residential developer dad. “Candidly, that wasn’t the path I was going down.” 

Instead, after moving back to the area after college, he worked connections in finance and real estate to get into the industry. It was a propitious time, especially in the loan sales game. The disruptive effects of the Global Financial Crisis were still reverberating, an environment that Daniels finds analogous to today’s loan sales market amid higher interest rates. That, of course, means more business ahead for the Chicago-based executive. 

“We do try to steer clear of predicting the future,” he said, “but there’s data that supports a number of mature loans coming due over the next three years.”