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CRE Finance World Winter 2016
14
A Roundtable:
Straight Talk from Industry Leading Borrowers
Conducted: November 10, 2015
Moderators:
Lisa Pendergast
Managing Director
Jefferies LLC
Stephanie Petosa
Managing Director
Fitch Ratings
Panelists:
Victor Coleman
CEO and Chairman
Hudson Pacific Properties
Michael Lascher
Global Head Real Estate Debt Capital Markets
Blackstone
Farzana Mitchell
Chief Financial Officer and EVP
CBL Properties
Mark Weiss
Chief Investment Officer
RFR
Our Roundtable Members Portfolios and Focus
Stephanie Petosa: Welcome everyone. Let’s start out by learning
about your individual companies and areas of focus. Please
provide us with a basic understanding of your firm’s investment
philosophy and your respective commercial and multifamily real
estate portfolios.
Michael Lascher:
Blackstone Real Estate has $93 billion of investor
capital under management. That is comprised of our Global
Opportunity Funds, European Opportunity Funds, Asia Opportunity
Fund, a new Core Plus strategy that we started about a year ago,
and our real estate debt strategies business. We’re on our eighth
global fund, which is a $15.8 billion Global Opportunity Fund. We
just launched fundraising for our fifth European Opportunity Fund.
The Asia opportunity I mentioned is our first Asia-dedicated Real
Estate Opportunity Fund. As I said, we started our Core Plus
strategy about a year ago and the BREDS business started in
2007 when Mike Nash joined Blackstone.
Mark Weiss:
RFR was started by two principals, Aby Rosen and
Michael Fuchs, in 1991. Next year is our 25th anniversary. We have
about $10 billion of real estate, 50% to 60% leverage, primarily in
New York City but we are also in Las Vegas, Miami, and Stamford;
plus we have a couple billion dollar Euro portfolio in Germany. Our
focus is primarily on office, hotel, residential and retail. Probably
the only area we don’t do is industrial. Our focus today is on value-
add properties in particular; buying and redeveloping properties
using the expertise we have particularly in New York City on the
redevelopment side.
Victor Coleman:
I started Hudson Pacific in 2008. We’re a Real
Estate Investment Trust; went public in 2010, with about $7-plus
billion dollars, all office, all West Coast from three major markets —
Seattle, San Francisco and the Peninsula and here in Los Angeles
where I’m sitting today.
Farzana Mitchell:
CBL is a Real Estate Investment Trust invested
in retail properties. We’ve been public since 1993, 22-plus years,
and prior to that privately owned. So collectively, we are over 35 years
old. We own approximately 133 properties. Our core properties
include 77 malls and 5 outlet centers; our other retail centers
generally are big box and grocery anchored located around the
periphery of the malls. CBL’s geographic footprint is primarily in
the Southeast and Midwest. We have been secured borrowers
for 30-plus years until the last three years, when we sought
and received investment-grade ratings from Fitch, Moody’s, and
recently S&P. We have transitioned to an unsecured borrowing