Gregg Gerken
Head of U.S. Commercial Real Estate at TD Bank
Last year's rank: 44
Folks at TD Bank knew going into 2020 that the year was going to be exciting and different, since the Cherry Hill, N.J.-based U.S. arm of the Toronto-Dominion Bank, a Canadian multinational, was going to move into One Vanderbilt, the latest supertall skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan.
Little did they know just how different the year was going to be, as COVID-19 upended businesses and industries across the worldwide map. But TD Securities, the first unit of the bank slated to relocate to the tower, managed to make its move in December, and, likewise, the bank continued to service its commercial real estate clients. It did about $700 million of originations November to November, which is its fiscal year.
Gregg Gerken said originantions were “down fairly significantly” over recent, non-COVID years. However, TD Bank remained a strong warehouse lender, providing more than $1.5 billion in credit to other lenders as a way of maintaining general market liquidity. While that market was actually up slightly in general in 2020, TD Bank was up just about twofold as a warehouse lender, because of the amount of activity in multifamily Fannie and Freddie lending, he said.
“Like a lot of other banking institutions, in the beginning, we were putting into place contingency plans to maintain operations, then we pivoted to a work-from-home environment,’’ Gerken said. “The entire banking industry has been working from home. We’re still working through a return-to-work plan, but I think the whole industry has done a pretty good job of being able to pivot and adapt.”
Zoom, Cisco Webex and Microsoft Teams “were not part of our toolkit, but now certainly are.”
About two-thirds of its CRE lending was construction loans, with most of that for apartments, according to the bank. The rest was split between office and industrial, and, to a lesser extent, retail, Gerken said.
The New York area represents roughly 20 percent of the TD Bank’s total loan volume, which is national, he said. It is the biggest “by far” among TD’s regions, Gerken said.—D.L.
