CHICAGO-Carlton Advisory Services Inc., based in New York City, has hired Jim Byczek as its first effort to handle Midwest loan sales from the local office here. Byczek was formerly a VP with the Des Plaines, IL-based Chartwell Group.

Carlton uses strategies such as auctions to maximize the value of distressed loans and REO assets for commercial loan servicer and institutional clients. Byczek has been in the loan sale and auction business for 25 years.

“In the Midwest there’s an untapped number of banks and financial institutions that have made quite a few loans, CMBS is going to have a trillion dollars due in the next three years. There’s going to be a great need for our services selling loan portfolios,” Byczek tells Globest.com.

He says with tighter lending guidelines and lower loan-to-value ratios, a lot of properties coming up for refinancing are going to face difficulty when it’s time to put additional equity in. “Instead of getting 80% loan to value, as we saw in 2006, the ratio has shrunk to 65%. They’re going to have to put in more equity, and that’s going to be an issue for some borrowers,” Byczek says.

It’s not just non-performing loans that are gaining investor interest, however, he says. There’s demand on both the buyer and seller side for loans with a good rate of 5% to 7% return.

Using its Carlton exchange business, the company sold assets in 40 states in 2010, including land, finished properties, cash-flowing hotels and office properties. A Chartwell spokesman did not return a call for comment for this story.