Charles Fyfe, 31
Senior associate at Cerberus Capital Management
A career in commercial real estate finance was not originally on the radar for Charles Fyfe when he studied biology at The Citadel, a military college in South Carolina. He initially planned to attend medical school, but a trip to study abroad opened his horizons to something different, ultimately leading him to jumpstart his CRE journey beginning with New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate.
“I had the bug for commercial real estate deep down, and it took some time to actually get the confidence to make the shift,” Fyfe said. “Post-graduation I was stumbling around going through the medical school application process and decided I wanted to make the jump and take the risk, and come up to New York and get involved with the NYU undergraduate program at Schack and make the transition.”
After graduating from Schack, Fyfe started his real estate finance career in 2016 as an analyst at private equity platform AlumCreek Holdings. AlumCreek was acquired by Clarion Partners in December 2017, and Fyfe was then tasked with launching its special situations debt group focused on distressed and opportunistic CRE credit acquisitions.
Following two years as a senior associate on the investment teams at CIM Group, Fyfe joined Cerberus in September 2021 as a member of the lender’s real estate private credit team. He said the deals he tackles vary in size, property type and geography.
Since last year, Fyfe has been an adjunct instructor at that same Schack that helped launch his career, and has taught a graduate-level course on real estate investment transactions.
“I’ve been out of the program long enough to be really fully immersed into the real working professional world, but I’m also not 30 years out of the program where being a student searching for a job is such a distant memory. So it’s a good touch place to be,” Fyfe said.
Outside of work, Fyfe says he enjoys skiing, hiking and tennis.
