Grant Frankel (clockwise from top left), 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: 19
Eastdil Secured has proved to be a market force over the past year with an uptick in volume and playing a front and center role in the recovery of the CMBS market.
The brokerage facilitated $65.3 billion in total transaction volume firm-wide with 278 debt placement transactions from March 1, 2024, to March 1, 2025, a more than 70 percent bump from the prior 12 months. The active year included advising on $22 billion of CMBS single-asset, single-borrower transactions, which saw a big uptick in activity at the end of 2024, and ended up boosting delta flow on the balance sheet side as well.
“The CMBS market was certainly wide open, and what that ended up doing was it really drove the balance sheet lenders to a new level of competitiveness,” said James Muhlfeld. “We did half a billion to $1 billion of balance sheet deals in the second half of the year that they really wouldn’t have done if they weren’t going to lose them to the CMBS market, so that source of liquidity really helped drive the balance sheet lenders back into the market in a meaningful way.”
Deal highlights from the last year included a $1.5 billion CMBS SASB refinance from Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase for Chow Tai Fook Enterprises Limited’s Baha Mar resort in the Bahamas that was priced in late November.
Eastdil Secured also facilitated a $1.2 billion SASB refinancing deal led by Morgan Stanley for RFR’s Seagram Building this past February.
While industrial, housing, data centers and self-storage accounted for a large chunk of Eastdil’s volume, the brokerage also boosted its hotel financings by $14 billion and office transactions by $12 billion.
Grant Frankel stressed that a key ingredient in Eastdil Secured’s success over the past year has been a team-focused effort coupled with communication across the firm that enables it to tackle the top deals.
“It’s a tremendous amount of connectivity at the top, but across all levels,” Frankel said. “It’s really from the analyst associate level up through the MD level across geography, and across products that allows all of us to be collectively smarter.”
