Dustin Stolly (left) and Jordan Roeschlaub.
Dustin Stolly and Jordan Roeschlaub
Vice Chairmen and Co-Heads of Debt and Structured Finance at Newmark Knight Frank
Last year's rank: 13
While the market was grappling with the onset of COVID-19, some firms were busy pivoting and adapting to meet client needs.
Dustin Stolly and Jordan Roeschlaub have firmly staked out their place in the world of debt placement, but when the pandemic brought the market to a screeching halt they quickly broadened their purview to offer assistance with loan sales and restructuring. As of the time of this interview in late June, they had more than $1 billion of loan sale transactions in the market.
“I had a business plan put together where we weren’t going to be a one-trick pony and solely broker debt, and that we were going to be able to pivot and train our team” to focus on distressed debt and other kinds of loan sales, said Stolly. “Turns out we had to train our team remotely, of course, but what Jordan and I did in a pretty quick period of time was — in partnership with our senior partners Nick [Scribani], Chris [Kramer] and Dan [Fromm] — train our younger staff how to analyze and value prospective loan sales while also keeping our core business of raising debt and equity going.”
As of mid-June, the team had $5 billion of transactions under its belt in 2020, $1.5 billion of which was signed up post-COVID. Not many firms can say that.
Pre-COVID, NKF came into this year riding high off a record 2019; Stolly and Roeschlaub’s team executed a massive $17 billion in transactions, up from $11.8 billion in 2018.
Notable transactions including a $1.025 billion refinance for Fontainebleau Miami Beach; a $615 million financing for the Park Lane Hotel; a $404 million refinance for RXR Realty’s 32 Old Slip; $143 million in acquisition financing for 300 Lafayette Street; and a $130 million loan to refinance the Hyatt Regency Lake Washington luxury hotel in Renton, Wash.
During COVID, the team continued to close substantial debt deals, including a $119 million loan for Fortune International Group and Château Group’s La Playa de Varadero project in Miami. They also have plenty more deals in the hopper, including the acquisition financing for RFR’s purchase of 522 Fifth Avenue and financing for a few industrial portfolios that are ‘national in scale,’ according to Jordan Roeschlaub.
Today, “we’re ramping back up on the new origination side as well as being busy on the loan sale side,” Roeschlaub said. “I think we’re at the inflection point where transaction closings are going to be a lot more frequent than they have been recently.”
And all this activity took place during a global pandemic.
“We’re extraordinarily appreciative of our team: this is 100 percent a team effort,” Stolly said. “To do all this remotely from almost 20 different locations, and to do it in a cohesive, constructive manner where everyone maintains the same culture and continuity that we had pre-COVID is kind of amazing.”—C.C.
