Matthew Masso and Stefanos Arethas
Head of Commercial Real Estate Finance; Head of Commercial Real Estate Origination at Credit Suisse
Last year's rank: 26
Credit Suisse’s CMBS team priced a conduit deal on March 11, 2020 — “the last conduit deal printed pre-COVID,” Matthew Masso said.
“It was definitely very difficult to get over the finish line, but nonetheless it got done in an orderly fashion,” he recalled. “If we had the same deal out a week later, it would have been much more challenging to get done.”
Masso related this story to illustrate how quickly the COVID crisis came on for commercial real estate. Unlike the relatively slow burn of 2008, liquidity disappeared last March like someone had flipped a switch.
Credit Suisse returned to doing business almost as rapidly, though.
“We tend to be a bit more nimble, a bit smaller than some of our larger commercial bank counterparts, and so while we had to triage for a couple weeks, we were able to pivot relatively quickly,” Masso said.
He and his team did $3.15 billion in new origination over the course of the year, lending across all asset classes, including some like retail that a number of other lenders were steering clear of.
For instance, in the midst of the pandemic, they originated and securitized the commercial mortgage trust CSMC 2020-NET, a $715 million, fixed-rate financing of 368 triple-net-leased retail properties. The transaction started out as a three-lender arrangement with Credit Suisse leading, but after the two other lenders backed out, Credit Suisse took over and funded 100 percent of the deal.
“We believed that necessity-based retail was going to outperform,” Stefanos Arethas said. “I think people were still seeing smoke just from all the stress in the market and not differentiating between different retail segments. Necessity-based retail still has a significant place.”
Credit Suisse also closed in Q3 a pair of New York City office deals, being one of the first lenders to step back into this market following the start of the pandemic. It closed in September on $255 in acquisition financing for RFR Realty’s purchase of the 575,000-square-foot office building 522 Fifth Avenue; and, in October, on $300 million in refinancing for Atlas Capital Group, Invesco and Partners Group’s 1.1 million-square-foot Long Island City office development The Factory.
“We are a firm believer in office and a believer in New York City, and we believe that we are all going back to the office eventually,” Arethas said. “I don’t think there is an existential threat to the New York City office market at all.”—A.B.
