Bert Crouch, Charlie Rose, Yorick Starr and Teresa Zien
Managing Director; Managing Director; Senior Director; and Managing Director at Invesco
Last year's rank: 48
Invesco managed to rack up a cool $1.525 billion in new originations over the past year, closing 26 loans.
Like most lenders, while volume dropped from previous years, the lending platform remained active in each quarter of the year, and pivoted to focus on smaller loans than typical, as volume in the market collapsed.
Notable deals included a $140.7 million acquisition loan to Goldman Sachs and Lincoln Property Company secured by Hollywood 959, a creative office building in Hollywood, Calif.
Invesco primarily focused on the investment hotspots of multifamily, industrial and life sciences conversion during the pandemic but also committed to two large office loans in 2020. Its competitive advantage remains its “real estate first” approach, competitive cost of capital, and relationship-focused mentality, Charlie Rose said.
“At this point a year ago, we were all coming off a month of working harder than any of us had worked since the GFC, and we were doing everything we could to close any loans that were in an advanced stage for our relationship borrowers,” he added. “We were able to stay in the market, albeit at a much-reduced scale throughout the pandemic, and closed loans in 10 of the 12 months of 2020.”
“In looking back over the 12 months, it’s amazing how things have swung so quickly from one side of the pendulum to the other for the haves and have nots,” Zien said. “As an industry, we’ve gone from a triage mentality a year ago to now being incredibly open for business for certain asset classes. That’s pretty remarkable.”
Now that the market is returning, Invesco has a solid deal pipeline ahead of it.
“Very little has changed in our investment parameters, and I think a lot of that is due to COVID serving as an accelerant for many trends that we were already anticipating,” Rose said. “We were already fairly conservative in our posture for office leasing, we have never made a retail loan, and the hotel loans that we made were necessity hotels with very well-capitalized borrowers and strong liquidity positions.
“Where I would say that the accelerant factor has really been seen in our business, is that we were an active lender in life sciences conversions prior to this period, and that experience allowed us to increase our exposure at a time when the sector is getting a lot of attention.”
Rose is co-chair of Invesco’s DEI Task Force, too, and Invesco’s debt business is now 68 percent diverse and 53 percent female.—C.C.
