Jordan Roeschlaub and Jonathan Firestone

Newmark pushed the envelope in a major way this past year, generating big volume by playing an active role in some of the largest deals.

The debt and equity brokerage platform led by Jordan Roeschlaub and Jonathan Firestone, facilitated $40.1 billion of debt for the year ending March 1, more than doubling its originations from the prior year. As if that weren’t impressive enough, Newmark also arranged $11.9 billion in equity raising for strategic advisory joint ventures, a growing business the group has pushed aggressively in the last two years.

“All of our deals are really setting the tone for the respective marketplace,” said Roeschlaub. “We’re reinventing capital brokerage and capital advisory, and I think it’s playing to where the street and where the world is going.”

One of Newmark’s most active roles in 2024 had to do with a comeback in the CMBS market, executing some of the year’s biggest SASB deals.

One of the large-scale CMBS deals Roeschlaub and Firestone arranged was the $1.2 billion refinance for Fontainebleau Development’s Fontaine-bleau Miami Beach hotel in December. That same month, the team also closed a $550 million CMBS loan for Fontainebleau’s JW Marriott Miami Turnberry Resort & Spa property. 

Feeding market appetite, Newmark further scaled its data center coverage over the past year with several large deals, including acting as a strategic adviser for a $3.4 billion joint venture between Blue Owl Capital and Primary Digital Infrastructure to fund a 206-megawatt data center project in Abilene, Texas, leased to Oracle. It also arranged a $2.3 billion construction financing package for the project from J.P. Morgan Chase. 

Roeschlaub noted that Newmark was ahead of the curve on the demand for data centers a few years ago, and he estimates it has advised on more than 90 percent of market share for the sector.

Another area where Newmark has responded to demand is office-to-residential conversions. Newmark brokered a $357 million construction loan in October from Tyko Capital for developers planning a much-anticipated office-to-resi conversion of the Flatiron Building and a $288 million loan in January 2025 from BDT & MSD Partners for GFP Real Estate’s transformation of 222 Broadway in Lower Manhattan.   

“There is nobody doing more office-to-resi conversions than Newmark right now on the debt side,” Firestone said. “A lot of people talk about it and they think about it, but we have a strong expertise.”