Jack Tawil, 26

Graduating college during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic changed the trajectory of Jack Tawil’s commercial real estate finance career.

Tawil, who graduated from Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business in 2020, initially had a job lined up facilitating CRE acquisitions at a large family office, but that job fell through due to the global health crisis. He managed to find another opportunity through a contact at Dwight Capital, and since joining the lender has developed a specialty over the last five years for originating multifamily loans insured by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). 

“Everything was up in the air back then and nobody knew what was going to happen in June of 2020, and I kind of pushed my way into Dwight and the finance, mortgage banking world,” Tawil said. “HUD financing is a pretty niche product, and I don’t think I would have picked it back then, but it has been great.”

Tawil has specialized in sourcing a variety of HUD-backed loans, and has so far financed more than 3,000 residential units. He now has a pipeline of roughly $600 million in loans.

The largest dean Tawil closed involved a $166.53 million HUD 223(f) loan in 2022 on behalf of  Capital Foresight for seven Southern California apartment complexes comprising 1,154 units. 

While HUD loan activity has slowed in the last three years due to elevated interest rates, Tawil has still managed to stay busy. Being hit with a market challenge early in his career proved beneficial, forcing him to think more outside the box in getting transactions across the finish line.

“When rates started rising so quickly, everything you had been working on for the last two, two and a half years was totally dead and you had to start over, so it was like starting day one on a new job,” Tawil said. “You had to put 10 times more effort in for half the results, but it pushed us to get creative and pushed us to get aggressive. And it’s finally coming to fruition.”