CBRE Sets Hotel Finance Anchor on West Coast

CBRE has placed a hotel finance anchor on the West Coast with the addition of Cara Leonard to the CBRE Hotels’ debt and structure finance team. Leonard, who will be based in the firm’s Beverly Hills office as SVP, brings the national hotel debt and structure finance team to four members, and will help to provide the full spectrum of client services. We sat down with Leonard to talk about her new position and the expansion of the platform in this exclusive interview.

GlobeSt.com: Tell me about your new position at CBRE, and why the firm has expanded the hotel debt and structured finance team to the West Coast.

Cara Leonard: We have a very strong investment sales platform on the West Coast and a very strong structured finance team with Mark Owens in New York, Jonathan Rice in Atlanta and Mark Sallette in Houston, but before I joined the platform, we didn’t really have any ability to service the West Coast and West Coast-based assets. I am definitely filling a void on the debt and structured finance team that I think will allow us to provide better services to our entire client base.

GlobeSt.com: What was the impetus to expand the hotels capital markets team?

Leonard: The fact that there is a tremendous need for financing made the desire to have an additional person out here on the West Coast even more pressing. We have tremendous capacity now. Our purpose is to transact in financing, but it is also to support the investment sales and valuation team as well. All of the teams interact together and provide support for each other. Part of our function here is not only to transact financing but also to support the investment sale process. As an owner is considering whether or not to bring an asset to market, they will commission a broker’s opinion of value. At that point, we can provide intel to our valuation’s group and to our brokers so that they can understand what financing would be available to a prospective buyer, and we can underwrite that assuming different buyer profiles and different business plans for the asset, which allows them to be more accurate in their estimate of market value on an asset.

GlobeSt.com: Why has CBRE chosen to its hotel debt and structured finance team now?

Leonard: On a macro level within the hotels business, there has been a real focus on growing the financing team so that we can provide a more full set of services for our clients. Obviously, we have the investment sales team with a tremendous number of investment sales professionals on the hotels team, and we have a select group of institutional sales professionals. They really blanket the entire United States, and a couple of years ago, CBRE acquired PKF, which allowed us to provide hotel-specific valuations with hotel-specific experts. The research that they provide us is a tremendous boom for the sales team and the finance team. The finance team had a void on the West Coast, so now we are in a position to provide the full suite to clients so that we can transact any place in the capital stack.

GlobeSt.com: Will there be more recruiting to the debt and structured finance team, either nationally or on the West Coast?

Leonard: The platform is always looking to bring on people that would be accretive to the platform, generally. There is always a recruiting effort within all client services areas. We don’t have a particular target market where we have touched a demonstrable void now that I am sitting in this seat, but we are definitely looking to expand out market share and increase our footprint.

GlobeSt.com: What are you initial goals in this position?

Leonard: The year-one goals are going to be to integrate the investment sales process and the existing debt and structured finance teams so that we are working under the model that best services our clients. We want to make sure that our entire investment sales team in the US is being properly served by the broader debt and structured finance team. Given that there were three debt and structured finance team members on the production side before and now there are four producers, we are seeing a 33% increase of capacity. So, our first year goal is to make sure that we are providing our clients with the best service possible and working as a team to promote the investment sales function and to execute on the financing assignments that we get. Once we get our process in place, our goal is to focus on expanding our client’s network on the West Coast and increase the number of investment sales team deals that translate into financing deals, but also to expand the team as our deal flow increases so that we can continue to be more profitable and take on more market share.