Justin Wheeler
CEO at Berkadia
Last year's rank: 46
Berkadia Proprietary Holding kept its huge commercial mortgage operation going through the COVID crisis of 2020. In fact, New York-based Berkadia, a joint venture of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and Jefferies Financial Group, wrote more than $35 billion of commercial mortgage lending, investment sales and joint venture equity placements last year, including $27 billion of loan production and $8 billion toward a total of 349 sale transactions.
The transactions included the $72.9 million construction financing of SunTrust Plaza at Church Street Station in Orlando, Fla., the largest single-asset office loan in the city and the third-largest in the entire state in 2020. Berkadia also closed a $186 million refinancing on a seven-facility hospital system across Puerto Rico, including four in San Juan, two in Arecibo and one in Mayagüez. The 25-year, fixed-rate, Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)-backed loans provided $33 million of new money to renovate and expand the hospitals, as well as to build new cogeneration systems for them.
“Our mortgage banking ended [2020] a little bit up,” Berkadia CEO Justin Wheeler said. “We actually did a little bit more than we did in 2019 — a few million dollars more. If you had told me that in April, that we would end up eclipsing 2019, which was our record year, I would have been very, very happy.”
About $19 billion of the $27 billion was agency loans — Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Department of Housing and Urban Development — he said.
Most of the company’s investment sales work occurred during January and February, Wheeler said, predating the onset of the COVID crisis, when “the bottom dropped out of the business and capital froze. So, really … March, April, May, even into June, there was very little activity that didn’t have a gun to its head.”
Berkadia “seamlessly” transitioned to remote work, including putting its entire loan-servicing team on remote almost overnight. The company also added more than 100 new staffers to its loan-servicing team and, in September, acquired LIHTC Advisors, an Idaho-based brokerage firm that specializes in affordable housing.—D.L.
