Photo: Courtesy Newmark
John Howley
Executive managing director at Newmark
For the last 30 years, John Howley has been one of the pre-eminent figures in the world of commercial real estate loan sales. But unless you were one of his clients, in either the public sector or private sector, you probably haven’t heard of him.
And Howley likes it that way.
“Most people don’t know me and that’s intentional: I don’t take out ads, and I don’t talk to the press,” he told Commercial Observer. “There’ve been lots of signature deals through the years, but nobody knows about them because we don’t talk about it.”
But recently, Howley and a small team of experts at Newmark were tapped to lead the highly coveted sale of $60 billion worth of loans originated by Signature Bank, which failed in March.
That might keep his name in the papers.
Generally, however, most outsiders associate loan sales with bad debt, and look askance at the practice. But the industry has been a crucial part of the capital markets ecosystem since the savings and loan crisis more than 30 years ago, when the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) essentially invented commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS), loan sales, and the securitization of real estate debt simultaneously to find a way out of what was then the largest financial collapse since the Great Depression.
Howley ended up completing more than 20 termination sales for the Resolution Trust Corporation in those early days, and has since worked with government agencies through the years. He led a $1.2 billion loan sale for the Small Business Administration in 2000, and quarterbacked a $1.3 billion loan sale for the FDIC in 2009.
“In order to be a survivor in the loan sale business, you have to have a mix of public and private sector clients; otherwise there’s periods of time where you’re just not going to transact and, for most, that’s probably right now,” he said, noting the current market distress.
In the meantime, the Signature Bank deal will be sure to keep him occupied.
“I don’t have an ego and I don’t do it for the glory,” he said. “If you’re doing loan sales for the glory, you’re not going to last. It’s not that type of business.”
