Bobby Renner.
Robert Renner, 32
Senior associate at Cerberus Capital Management
Robert “Bobby” Renner started his career in accounting, but always had a hankering to work in real estate. Fate opened a window when he got an opportunity to work at a single-family rental (SFR) acquisition business in 2015, right at the time when the SFR space was becoming increasingly institutionalized. The company he joined had already acquired 10,000 homes — adding an additional 300 every month.
From there he went to Amherst as an originations analyst before landing at CIT as an assistant vice president of real estate finance, and then at Cerberus to help start the firm’s debt fund in 2020.
The team had plenty of capital to put out as the market started to rebound from COVID. Renner describes the experience of building out the fund as simply “awesome,” while his boss, Neha Santiago, described him as an “entrepreneur in every sense of what is needed to build and run a business from the bottom up.”
The nature of Cerberus’ debt fund investment strategy means that the platform can pursue the opportunities that make the most sense as market conditions change — which has been key the past few years.
“It’s an opportunistic fund, so we’re able to look at all sorts of transactions,” he said. “We can pivot based on market conditions and build out our portfolio with allocations that we like. When I joined, we had a really strong market that was coming back and rebounding, but now it’s a different market with rising interest rates. We’re fortunately able to be patient with our capital and pivot to make investments that work with the current market conditions.”
Interestingly, the very first loan Renner made brought him full circle to his career start in the SFR space: an acquisition loan for 800 units. Since then, he’s been busy originating across asset types and geographies.
His transactions include a $52 million loan for the acquisition of two industrial properties in the Philadelphia area, a $42 million loan to finance the acquisition and repositioning of an historic hotel in downtown Tampa, and an $80 million condo inventory loan on a new project in Atlanta.
As for some advice he’d give the next round of young professionals considering a career in commercial real estate? “Go for it,” he said. “It only gets better as you dive deeper into the industry.” —C.C.
