ATLANTA-A10 Capital may be a young company, but it is attracting some heavy hitters. The commercial real estate financing firm has hired Chuck Taylor to head up Southeast markets for the firm.

Taylor spent nine years at J.P. Morgan where he was most recently executive director of Commercial Real Estate Capital Markets. As co-head of the Atlanta Regional Office for four years, it consistently surpassed its production goals.

“We are very pleased to have Chuck Taylor join our firm to help us address the demand for commercial real estate financing that we are seeing in the Southeast,” Jerry Dunn, CEO of A10 Capital, said in a statement. “His extensive knowledge of and relationships in those markets will be a great asset to our firm.”

In addition to his tenure at J.P. Morgan, Taylor previously served as director of Acquisitions at Reynolds Capital Group in Atlanta, where he lead the acquisitions team for a $130-plus million private equity fund that focused on distressed real estate assets located in the Southeastern U.S. At A10, Taylor is responsible for sourcing all new commercial real estate debt and equity opportunities in the Southeast markets of Georgia, Florida, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Alabama and Tennessee.
 
“On the debt platform, A10 is targeting a space that is in dire need of producing capital for deals that are below the $15 million to $20 million radar screen,” Taylor tells GlobeSt.com. “There seems to be debt capital available in the universe of $20 million and above but it really starts to tail off in terms of providers in the space we’re targeting.”

As Taylor sees it, as an unregulated lending business, A10 Capital has the ability to structure non-recourse loans on properties that need to be leased up before qualifying for CMBS or life financing. And he notes plenty of opportunities in the Southeast to provide bridge financing on commercial real estate properties.

“On the bridge side, a lot of the typical balance sheet players for this type of loan are no longer participating, whether it’s community banks or other groups,” Taylor says. “They are really trying to deal with balance sheet issues or shedding commercial real estate assets. We are optimistic that we are going to have a lot of opportunity, maybe not to ourselves but at least limited competition, especially on the non-recourse side.”