Miriam Wheeler (clockwise from top left), Sid Shrivastava, Andrew White, and Timothy Richards.
Miriam Wheeler, Sid Shrivastava, Timothy Richards and Andrew White
Global head of real estate finance; head of real estate originations; co-head of conduit originations; and U.S. head of Real Estate Credit Partners IV at Goldman Sachs
Last year's rank: 9
Goldman Sachs seized on improving lending conditions in 2024, more than doubling its 2023 volume.
The Wall Street giant executed $13.2 billion of securitized volume for the year compared with $6 billion in 2023 aided by some large-scale CMBS transactions as spread tightening and more clarity on interest rates came into motion. The improving market environment was evident with Goldman Sachs’ fixed-rate conduit financing business, which nearly doubled from the previous year to around $3 billion.
“Rates dropping and spreads compression led people to get more confident with blocking in fixed-term financing for a five-year period,” Timothy Richards said. “The mentality shift in our clients got them to be more comfortable with refinancing, and you saw more appetite from the bond buyers as well, which led to spread compression across the board.”
An active year on the CMBS front for Goldman Sachs was highlighted by leading a $1.4 billion single-borrower BX 2024-VLT4 refinance deal in May 2024 securitized by three Blackstone-owned data center assets. It marked the largest data center loan for 2024, and received strong investor demand a year after initially pricing in less favorable market conditions.
“When Blackstone saw a window to refinance the deal at a tighter spread, they decided to tap us to do it,” Sid Shrivastava said. “You also had the tailwinds of the investor demands with the sector being a lot more robust than it had been historically, and that’s ultimately what resulted in the deal getting done at a very efficient level.”
Goldman Sachs also co-led a $975 million CMBS deal with J.P. Morgan Chase to refinance the Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel in December 2024, which marked the tightest floating-rate AAA-rated transaction in the hospitality sector since 2022.
Goldman Sachs’ alternatives business also had a big year, raising $7 billion in May for its fourth high-yields credit fund called Real Estate Credit Partners IV. The fund deployed over the last year just under $1 billion of the capital raised.
“There’s a huge maturity wall that we all see coming, and the need for size and certainty of execution we think plays really well into our strengths of this fourth fund,” said Andrew White, who oversees the fund. “We think there’s a large secular shift around liquidity in the alternative space and being in front of the markets in scale.”
