NEW YORK CITY—TPG Capital has hired Greta Guggenheim, a cofounder and former CIO at Ladder Capital, as CEO of TPG Real Estate Finance Trust, the firm's debt origination and acquisition platform, a spokesman for TPG has confirmed. Guggenheim is scheduled to assume her new position in January, and will be based in New York City.

A Ladder Capital spokesman did not respond to GlobeSt.com's requests for comment by deadline Thursday afternoon. However, Thomas Harney, head of merchant banking and capital markets at Ladder, told Bloomberg Business Thursday that “We'll certainly miss [Guggenheim], but we have a particularly deep bench of senior management in commercial real estate and we look forward to continued success.” Guggenheim's name is no longer listed on the Ladder website.

Fort Worth-based TPG launched the mortgage REIT this past January after acquiring a majority stake in a $2.5-billion portfolio of high-yield real estate loans from Deutsche Bank's special situations group, with Deustche Bank retaining a 25% stake in the loans. The portfolio was comprised of 57 performing first-mortgage loans backed by apartment, office, condominium, hotel and industrial assets in gateway markets across the US, concentrated mainly in New York and Los Angeles.

GlobeSt.com reported in January that as part of the transaction, a team of 11 origination and risk management professionals from Deutsche Bank's special situations group joined the newly created TRT, which was established to originate new loans to existing and new borrowers. The mortgage REIT raised capital from a group of institutional investors with total equity commitments in excess of $750 million.

The mortgage REIT is part of TPG's real estate platform, which also includes TPG Real Estate Partners, its equity investment platform. TPG Real Estate Partners has invested approximately $3 billion of equity in North America and Europe since 2009 and focuses primarily on investments in property-rich platforms and companies. Collectively, the two platforms have more than $6 billion of assets under management across TPGRE and other TPG-sponsored vehicles.

Bloomberg Business reported Thursday that alternative investment firms have been building their real estate businesses as banks cut back. Within the past several weeks, Ares Management LP and Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors, both of which are parent companies of major real estate platforms, agreed to merge in a combination that will manage a combined $113 billion worth of assets across five investment groups.

Apollo Global Management, which at one time owned the real estate platform that eventually was sold to Ares, said earlier this month that it would acquire a majority stake in AR Global, a newly formed company that will own substantially all of the asset management business of Nicholas Schorsch's AR Capital. Schorsch will serve as senior managing director of the new company. In a separate but related deal, Apollo also agreed to acquire RCS Capital's wholesale distribution business for $25 million in cash, and said it had also entered into a strategic partnership with RCS's retail advice business, Cetera Financial Group.

TPG itself is magnifying its presence in another area of commercial real estate—services firms. Having led a consortium that acquired and then combined Cassidy Turley and DTZ earlier this year, it will now bring one of the most venerable names in CRE, Cushman & Wakefield, under the same ownership. GlobeSt.com reported in May that DTZ and C&W would merge in a $2-billion deal; the combined company will operate under the Cushman & Wakefield banner.

Formerly at Bear Stearns and UBS, Guggenheim co-founded Ladder in 2008 with CEO Brian Harris and chief strategy officer Pamela McCormack in 2008. It began operating as a REIT earlier this year.