Kassandra Saridakis

Kassandra Sarikdakis is going on six years since joining Newmark’s Washington, D.C., debt and equity capital markets operation.

She and her partner, Vice Chairman Joe Donato, are responsible for overseeing the firm’s mid-Atlantic capital advisory business, which originated a cool $1.2 billion in new debt, with about $2 billion in capitalized transaction value, through the pandemic and the first few months of 2021.

Over that time, Newmark’s D.C. team dabbled in nearly every asset class, financing about 1,200 multifamily units and 5.5 million square feet of real estate. While they capture their fair share of repeat business, which often takes them across the country with their clients, about 80 percent of the team’s production volume has been in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia (DMV) region.

Saridakis said her team, which includes a group of six finance professionals and an analyst, got off to a roaring start in 2020 before the pandemic froze the market for commercial real estate debt.

“We went from having a fairly robust pipeline in March 2020, and then, over the next couple months, we became consultants and advisers,” she said. “We were having daily conversations with lenders, and it seemed that every two to three weeks, lenders would change their [lending] programs.”

One of the most notable deals to come out of Newmark’s D.C. outpost in 2020, Saridakis said, was a situation in which her team helped usher an offshore, foreign investor through the process of making its first two acquisitions in the D.C. area, securing bank financing for two single-tenanted, suburban offices — a risky proposition for a bank amid a downturn.

Saridakis said that while banks and other lenders were not really lending on single-tenant property, they secured bids from bank, debt fund and CMBS lenders. She added that the deal was a “great example of our team being persistent, and knowing the story of the submarkets and tenants within the buildings.”

They also recently secured acquisition debt from a life company for the Mid-Atlantic Commerce Center, an 850,000-square-foot, stabilized industrial asset in a suburb of Baltimore, Md. BentallGreenOak bought the property for $125 million from Grandview Partners. Newmark’s Baltimore investment sales team worked with Saridakis and Donato’s team to make it happen.

Saridakis said the deal got a “ton of interest from life companies” given the 10-year profile and the pricing, which came in at around the 10-year Treasury plus 105 to 120, and the fact that it’s full of credit tenants — Domino Sugar anchors it, and TJ Maxx signed on for more than 205,000 square feet in December 2020 to use it as a regional distribution center.