Clockwise: Mitch Sinberg, Jaret Turkell, Scott Wadler, and Omar Morales.
Mitch Sinberg, Jaret Turkell, Scott Wadler, and Omar Morales
Senior managing directors; managing director; associate director at Berkadia
The Berkadia team in South Florida is perhaps one of the most creative working in the region.
Take the sale of parcels surrounding The Diplomat Beach Resort in Hollywood. After Trinity Investments and Credit Suisse purchased the 1,000-room hotel for $850 million, Scott Wadler and Jaret Turkell heard rumblings that the joint venture was looking to spin off the property’s developable parcels.
“So we brought them our clients, Related Group and BH Group — basically pre-empted that process,” Wadler said. The developers assembled the 8-acre site for just over $50 million, where they plan to build a 38-story residential building.
By the looks of the team’s 2024 pipeline, you wouldn’t know that the hikes in interest rates have slowed the debt market. Wadler is now negotiating for construction loans worth about $1 billion for high-profile condo projects, which are expected to close by the middle of this year. These include Related Group’s Baccarat tower and Six Fisher Island, as well as Turnberry’s One Park Tower.
The team’s work extends far beyond South Florida, too, having closed debt deals in Virginia, Oklahoma City, Seattle, Philadelphia and the Carolinas.
And that takes creativity. “We’ve been able to add significant value to our clients who are doing developments by helping them with construction loans that ordinarily they wouldn’t need our help on: by raising equity from sources that ordinarily they wouldn’t have even known about,” Mitch Sinberg said.
Besides helping the team close deals — $3.3 billion in land and multifamily properties across South Florida — Omar Morales has grown to nearly 20,000 followers on X, where he touts the Miami market.
“We have not only made debt introductions to our clients, but we’ve brought them equity, we’ve brought them land, which is very rare,” Wadler said. “We’re trying to go above and beyond.”
All together, that’s quite the package.
