NEW YORK CITY-Veteran investment banker David Eyzenberg tells GlobeSt.com that when it comes to that aspect of the business he’s now overseeing as NewOak Capital’s head of commercial real estate, much of the action is in capital structures. “The majority of business I’ve been seeing has been in recapitalization,” he says, adding that he expects to see this trend continue and for this aspect of the business to continue growing.

Generally, Eyzenberg says, recaps come in either for an overleveraged property or even a reasonably leveraged one where the debt is coming due and requires “something more than a first mortgage. We have a number of engagements where we bring in either equity or mezzanine financing to move the ball past the due date of the current date.” Add to that discounted payoffs, often in tandem with recaps, he says.

Investment banking, and specifically sell-side representation, is one of three prongs of NewOak’s commercial real estate platform, which Eyzenberg was brought in to manage when NewOak bought his firm Prodigious Capital Group at the end of 2010. Another is investment advisory, where NewOak offers a separate accounts business.

The trend there, he says, is that “a good number of institutions, if they’re focusing on value-add and opportunistic strategies, don’t necessarily want to put their money into blind-pool funds. “ As far as the institutions are concerned, the pools represent “no control, no transparency and no optionality.” NewOak will offer a product whereby the company will “identify, structure, underwrite and execute some sort of programmatic investment focus for wherever the institution wants to play.”

In the past, there was what Eyzenberg calls “almost a negative selection process. The theory was that if you’re a good investment manager, you’re going to get discretionary funds. The reality is that even the best discretionary managers made mistakes and lost money, so I don’t think it’s a function of negative selection. It’s a function of institutions wanting the appearance of more control, and a separate accounts structure allows them to have that.” This structure will be especially prevalent for family offices and foreign institutions, he adds.

Asked whether acquiring debt or the going directly to the underlying assets is finding more favor, Eyzenberg says that broadly speaking, “If you look at all the of the funds that were formed to acquire distressed debt, they’re the ones that are shouting the loudest about why the banks aren’t unloading things at fire-sale values. Some of that is obviously self-serving, but you’ll find that a lot of them are going to shift from debt acquisition to fee acquisition, because most of the debt-acquisition guys were fee-acquisition guys in the first place. So it’s not going to be that hard a transition.”

The third component of NewOak’s real estate line is a solutions and advisory business which leverages NewOak’s broader platform. “NewOak has done about $400 billion of notional valuations for various structured products,” Eyzenberg says. “My group is going to focus on the real estate structured products, whether they’re CMBS, CLOs, CDOs--all of the acronyms out there. Due to the passage of Dodd-Frank, institutions have to have third-party valuations of their portfolios. It’s a competitive set for us, because NewOak has experience firm-wide with the structured product on up; my group is going to do from the structured product on down to the asset level.”

Eyzenberg is reluctant to offer prognostications on what the remainder of 2011 holds in store, other than noting that the market recovery is not yet steady enough to withstand unexpected turns such as the unrest in the Middle East or, more recently, the calamitous earthquake and tsunami in Japan. “It’s all exogenous events at this point,” he says.

Before forming Prodigious in 2005, Eyzenberg headed the New York office of Madison Capital Group, and before that was at Wall Street Capital, a Cantor Fitzgerald spinoff. He has also played key roles at Greenstreet Partners and Ramius Capital Group, and began his career with Merrill Lynch’s real estate planning and transactions group.