Company
Mosaic Real Estate Credit & MREC Management
Bio
Ethan Penner is the Managing Partner and co-Founder of Mosaic Real Estate Investors, a Los Angeles based investment manager focused on producing differentiated returns while prizing principal preservation, which has grown in its nearly six years to become among the leaders in real estate finance. Ethan is a recognized pioneer in the fields of real estate and finance, specializing in real estate, mortgage credit, and financial markets.
Ethan is a philosopher operating in the finance world who has brought a unique understanding of human behavior to his field. This has facilitated his outsized contributions to the real estate industry and especially during periods of extreme dislocation such as today’s. In the early 1990’s, in such a systemic dislocation, Ethan created the CMBS industry – bringing bond market capital through his company, Capital Company of America/Nomura Capital, to fill the massive void left when all traditional mortgage lenders abandoned the market at once. This achievement places him among a small handful of individuals who have created entire financial markets, and earned him massive recognition, including being named one of the U.S. Real Estate industry’s 100 icons of the 20th century, being voted the Real Estate industry’s Financial Services Executive of the Year for five consecutive years, and being included in Global Finance Magazine’s list of the world’s most powerful people in Finance. In 2011 Real Estate Forum voted him one of the industry’s 65 living legends in their 65th anniversary issue.
Ethan’s 37-year career includes stints as the founder and leader of CBRE Capital Partners, which was created in response to the Global Financial Crisis and capitalized upon that dislocation to produce outsized investor returns. He also was among the early pioneers of the structured mortgage finance and trading business in the 1980’s, spearheading the mortgage trading/capital commitment and structured finance effort at Morgan Stanley and before that at Drexel Burnham Lambert.
He is an adjunct professor at Pepperdine’s Graziadio School of Business and is a noted public speaker.