Matthew Masso (left) and Stefanos Arethas.
Matthew Masso and Stefanos Arethas
Head of Commercial Real Estate Finance; Head of Commercial Real Estate Origination at Credit Suisse
Last year's rank: 31
Like a sleek Swiss Army Knife, Credit Suisse is good at lots of things and that shows in its deal volume and market prowess.
Last year, the bank racked up $5.1 billion between balance sheet and securitized loans, and that number doesn’t even include its warehouse financing activity.
One source CO chatted with during the list-making referred to Credit Suisse as “big game hunters.” And we can see why. At the forefront of many buzzed-about transactions, in June, it took the left-lead role on Lineage Logistics’ $2.35 billion CMBS financing of 64 temperature-controlled warehouses (CSMC 2019-ICE4). The deal helped Lineage become the largest cold storage company in the world, beating out the former title-holder, Americold.
And in October, Credit Suisse was sole lead and structurer for the first-ever Fannie Mae multifamily risk transfer deal, MCAS 2019-01. The transaction was several times oversubscribed with across-the-board market participation and earned the “Deal of the Year” accolade from IFR. Not stopping there, the bank is currently leading the second MCAS deal.
“One of the big things that we’ve been pushing to expand is balance sheet syndicated loans, and last year we did a number of fairly high-profile transactions,” Matt Masso said.
One example is the $400 million financing the bank led in December for Dreamscape Companies’ purchase of the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas from Caesars Entertainment Corporation. Another is the $300 million loan it provided for Brookfield Properties’ Sono Collection Mall in Norwalk, Conn., in August. The property is anchored by Nordstrom and Bloomingdales.
When the world was falling apart during the coronavirus pandemic, Credit Suisse continued to line up deals, including a $250 million balance sheet loan. Retailer Big Lots sold four of its distribution facilities to Oak Street Real Estate Capital, and the bank provided short-term, floating-rate financing for two of the four assets in a lease-back deal. As anessential business, Big Lots has remained open and performed extremely well during COVID.
Looking ahead to the rest of the year, “I think we want to be a little more opportunistic, and I think we’ll be a little more strategic in deploying capital and taking on larger deals for good clients,” Stefanos Arethas said. “That’s where we see the world today.”
As for lessons learned from COVID-19, “we’ve all been taught through past crises to underwrite the various stress scenarios, but no one ever thought about a stress scenario where everything was closed,” Masso said. “It does make you think about the unknown.”—C.C.
