Tom Traynor (left) and Tom Rugg.
Tom Traynor and Tom Rugg
Vice chairs and co-heads of U.S. large loans in debt and structured finance at CBRE
Last year's rank: 14
2025 proved that even in a volatile market, business has never been better for the Global Institutional Debt Advisory group at CBRE.
Led by Tom Traynor and Tom Rugg, this 10-person unit of large loan specialists arranged $13.7 billion across 54 transactions — essentially one deal per week — carrying an average loan size of $254 million, giving the team its highest performance volume since CBRE formed the debt and structured finance unit nine years ago.
“Because we don’t have this massive and expansive group, we have to pick and choose everything we work on, and we have to be careful of our time,” explained Traynor. “We can’t just take any deal that comes our way. But by focusing on a few groups and large deals — frankly the biggest institutional players in the market — we get to work on different transactions, in different geographies, across different asset classes.”
Rugg believes the secret to the team’s success at CBRE is due to two decades he and Traynor spent at premier investment banks, notably Deutsche Bank, managing large loans for institutional partners.
“Having that relationship with clients and being able to translate that into a firm like CBRE, which has its tentacles literally everywhere, positions us so uniquely for our clients,” said Rugg.
Even amid high interest rates, persistent inflation, Liberation Day tariffs and war in the Middle East, the CBRE team arranged several major transactions over the last 12 months.
These include a $1.4 billion SASB loan to refinance the 11 Madison office asset in Manhattan; a $1.2 billion construction loan for a new data center in Northern Virginia; and $850 million to refinance a portfolio of 17 industrial facilities spanning 9 million square feet.
“Our focus is institutional debt and institutional clients, and that means our clients take us wherever their capital is taking them,” said Rugg.
Traynor, ever the gentleman, credited the greater CBRE platform.
“We have fantastic internal partners on the investment sales side, the leasing side, and there are 130,000 employees here around the globe,” he said. “There are just so many resources and so much data and information that we have.”
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