Arman Samouk, 29

Real estate wasn’t originally in the cards for Arman Samouk.

He had planned to attend Columbia University to follow the “traditional son of immigrants” path of becoming a doctor. (His parents left Bosnia for Ohio after the war in that country.) Samouk quickly realized medicine wasn’t for him, and he tapped Columbia’s alumni network to meet people in real estate. 

Samouk wasn’t starting from scratch. His father used the money he made from his factory job to purchase and renovate a few investment properties. Once the younger Samouk learned about the capital markets industry, he was hooked.

“I really loved the fast-paced environment, the multiple deals, and not really going deep on any single deal,” he said.

After interning at various companies starting in his freshman year, Samouk landed a job at CBRE six years ago, working on the debt and structured finance team led by Tom Traynor and Tom Rugg.

And Samouk’s had his hand in nearly every asset class since, including the $850.5 million refinancing of a 17-asset industrial portfolio this past April and the $450 million refi of the Riverie luxury residential project in Brooklyn in February.

He’s also developed an expertise in the red-hot data sector market, working on more than $6.4 billion of deals. While he has to remain tight-lipped on the specifics, those deals include a $1.6 billion construction loan for a private equity sponsor and more than $1.2 billion in loans for a data center sponsor.

But it’s not just data centers Samouk had to quickly get up to speed on. He’s also been working on plenty of self-storage deals.

The ability to quickly pivot has been a hallmark of Samouk’s career. He graduated from Columbia — where he also played football — in the midst of the pandemic, and has since navigated dislocations such as wars, interest rate hikes and tariffs.

“My career — there has been really no normal market to fall back on,” he said.

Beyond closing billions in deals, Samouk recently celebrated another milestone: fatherhood. He and his wife welcomed a baby girl. They now live in Jersey City, N.J., in a building Samouk just so happened to underwrite.