Aaron Appel, Keith Kurland, Adam Schwartz and Jonathan Schwartz

You know you’ve been busy when you added a cheeky $11 billion in transaction volume to your advisory activities in just 12 months. The Walker & Dunlop foursome’s numbers skyrocketed to $15.5 billion in the year ending March 2025, compared with $4.4 billion for the same period the year before. 

The team, which also includes Sean Reimer and other MVPs, was busy across asset classes, including niche property types like student housing, self-storage facilities and film production studios. It tackled the full smorgasbord of client needs from construction and bridge financing to permanent financing to JV equity to loan workouts from coast to coast. 

Notable deals include the $1.2 billion condominium and hotel refi for New York’s One High Line on behalf of Witkoff, Access Industries and Monroe Capital; a $630 million multifamily equity recap with Harbor Group International on behalf of Garrett Companies and Telis Group; and a $220 million loan extension for RFR’s 17 State Street.

“This past year was great,” Keith Kurland said. “Coming off a slower, more challenging `23, we were excited to see volumes pick up, and our hard work, focus and strategy within our existing client roster pay off. As well as growing our business overall, we created additional teams that sit here in New York, and that’s really pushed into 2025 in a big way.” 

Those new businesses include hospitality and data center verticals, with the hiring of Jay Morrow and Andrew Kaskel to lead them, respectively. 

“The [data center] sector has been something that we’ve been focused on and learning and trying to figure out how to penetrate in a very meaningful way,” Kurland said. “It seems to be working. We’ve over $3 billion of data center deals today, with a bunch more in the pipeline.” 

“We’ve been asset class agnostic, and made a conscientious push to build out teams and sectors,” Aaron Appel said. “We think there are great opportunities to join us, considering our standing in the public markets, our reputation, and the ability for people to take leadership positions and really grow with us here.” 

(Word on the street is industrial will be the next vertical the team tackles.) 

While roughly 70 percent of the team’s activity was in the New York metro area, it has also grown its business by following its clients and credit and capital partners to outside markets. 

“The decisions are still getting made out of New York predominantly, and that’s where we’ve got amazing relationships. So I think it’s a huge advantage to us,” Jonathan Schwartz said. “In terms of asset classes, there’s really nothing we haven’t touched in a pretty meaningful way — and I think that that’s continued to be our differentiator in the market.” 

And it’s not the only one. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll likely have heard that the firm added brokerage superstar Dustin Stolly to its team. 

“Dustin built out Newmark’s capital markets platform, and we’re really excited to be able to have him,” Appel said. “He’s going to help us build out our teams around the rest of the country, and he’s got a long-standing relationship list with some people that we don’t have. He gives us more bandwidth to help grow our platform, and we couldn’t be more excited to have him there.”