James Millon, Tom Traynor and Tom Rugg

For most commercial real estate brokers, it’s a coup to secure a single $287 million loan for a client. But for Tom Traynor and Tom Rugg, who specialize in large loans at CBRE, their team’s average deal size in 2024 was $287 million.

Overseen by James Millon — a former team chair who now leads CBRE’s U.S. debt and structured finance operation — Traynor and Rugg’s team knows that they’re supported by someone who intimately understands the complexities of their business and the unique expertise they provide to big-fish clients.  

“It’s strategically important for us, with our biggest and most complicated deals, with our most sophisticated clients, that we put our best athletes on the field,” Millon told CO. “When a Blackstone or a Brookfield hires CBRE, that’s an extension of them — and the expectation is you’ll execute and provide ideas consistent with the ideas they come up with and how they execute their business.”

Rugg and Traynor’s team of eight executed $14.6 billion of total transaction volume across 51 deals in 2024, while Millon’s entire debt and structured finance platform arranged $50.7 billion in loan originations and loan sales across 1,914 deals, averaging $26 million per transaction.

“I always expect this team to contribute 10 to 15 percent of the overall production, and that’s largely skewed because of the size of deals they’re working on,” said Millon.

Traynor admitted that it’s been a challenging interest rate environment since COVID-19 inaugurated an eventful decade, and that many surprises have contributed to various difficulties in the market. But he added those challenges make his job that much more important. 

“Our clients are trying to manage these things, and we’re trying to help them manage them,” Traynor said. “So you’re dealing with a lot of these situations with exasperated sponsors and exasperated lenders. … It’s a macroeconomic element, and you just have to get through it.” 

In 2024, the CBRE large loan experts leaned into data centers, which represented over 34 percent of the team’s transaction volume. Several of the most prominent data center deals included two construction loans and one predevelopment loan totaling $1.2 billion to finance four data centers in Northern Virginia, and a $514 million financing package to help HMC-StratCap acquire a 32-megawatt data center in suburban Chicago, representing the largest data center acquisition financing of 2024. Furthermore, construction opportunities represented 47 percent of the team’s origination volume. 

“Nowhere were we more influential than in the data center space,” said Rugg. “We’re quickly expanding into that space. In the past year, we led market share and loan volume and deal count, and it’s where we have an extremely active pipeline.”