Allison Wolfe and Chad Remis
Chief Financial Officer and Global Head of Portfolio Management; Executive Vice President for North America at Oxford Properties Group
Last year's rank: 13
Oxford Properties Group saw it all coming.
At least that’s what it seems like in retrospect and in talking to its top executives for North America, Allison Wolfe and Chad Remis. The company anticipated higher financing costs — for them and everyone else — and a decline in demand for certain asset classes. Oxford globally and in North America, for instance, has been winding down its office holdings as a proportion of its portfolio. It sold 450 Park Avenue to SL Green in April 2022 for $445 million, and finalized the $2.1 billion sale of the redeveloped St. John’s Terminal in Manhattan to Google the same month.
By the time the second half of 2022 and its myriad challenges arrived, the owner and developer with around $60 billion in North American assets under management was ready.
“We sort of forecasted that rates were going to be rising, and, as a result of that, we started selling lower-cap-rate assets,” Remis said. “We sold a fair bit of industrial; we sold some resi; we sold $4.5 billion of office in 2022. We’ve redeployed that capital into credit where we felt like we had a lot of tailwinds in rates and in risk-adjusted returns and with protection on basis.”
The credit deployment — most of it at floating rates that actually benefited from interest rate increases — came as so much of the commercial real estate financing climate turned frigid.
“So when you saw the liquidity come out of the market, we were in a really good position to deploy north of $1 billion in that second half at, call it, double-digit returns,” Wolfe said, referring to the last six months of 2022. “And that’s what we want to do is be a liquidity provider when there is liquidity coming out of the market.”
Meanwhile, in anticipation of the tumult, Oxford cleaned up its own balance sheet with interest rate caps and fixed terms, Wolfe said. Now it can continue to focus on that credit business as well as the more in-
demand asset classes such as life sciences. It’s a deliberative, calculated approach suitable for a time when capital is pricier and scarcer, and uncertainty reigns.
Or, as Remis put it, Oxford’s recent history has been about “transitioning the organization from ‘Go fast’ to ‘Go deep.’ ”
