Erin Stafford is a Managing Director with Morningstar DBRS leading the Commercial Real Estate Credit Rating teams in North America. Ms. Stafford oversees the responsible for Morningstar DBRS credit ratings activity in the North America for Conduit, Agency, SASB and CRE CLO transactions, Corporate Commercial Real Estate, and the Real Estate Adjacent Asset classes. The team also looks at the operational risk associated with commercial mortgage servicers resulting in Morningstar DBRS Commercial Mortgage Servicer Rankings.
Ms. Stafford has over 25 years of experience working at rating agencies in the Commercial Real Estate and CMBS industries. Prior to joining DBRS, Ms. Stafford was with Fitch Ratings in the CMBS group with a focus on monitoring ratings of existing CMBS transactions. She has served as a co-chair of the Post Securitization committee of the CRE Finance Council (formerly CMSA) and as Chair for the Servicer's Forum of the CRE Finance Council. Industry work for the CRE Finance Council also includes CMBS 201 Seminars, a White Paper on Canadian Defeasance and conducting IRP Tutorials as part of the Council's educational initiatives. Erin has also served as Chair of the International Committee for the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) and is a past member of the MBA board of governors (COMBOG) where she was elected to serve as the COMBOG member-elect on the association’s governing board.
Ms. Stafford holds a Masters of Business Administration from Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management with a concentration in real estate and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Wisconsin – Madison.