“There’s two reasons why I came to Toorak. One is that there’s a lot of room for us to grow outside those Freddie and Fannie multifamily deals that just aren’t compliant, and not everybody is going to have the ability to purchase a home or want to own one,” he said.
“The other is the people and the opportunity to work with John (Beacham -Toorak’s CEO) and Ketan (Parekh – the firm’s head of lender relations and capital markets). John has built a kind of better mousetrap. There are sections of the market where you don’t have the right amount of capital providers and John’s figured out how to come in and address those issues.”
It was Myers’ experience working in affordable home projects for New York City that caught Beacham’s eye, as the New Jersey-based company was looking to expand its multifamily lending platform and incorporate affordable and social initiatives into its portfolio.
It’s a gap Toorak believes it can exploit and thrive in because, as Myers pointed out, “agency lenders aren’t going out there investing dollars in large rehabs”.
As a former production manager with Freddie Mac and VP for lending at Citigroup, among others, Myers went on to advise on multifamily debt transactions, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. He also securitized billions more in commercial real estate in addition to overseeing renegotiation terms on loan defaults, such as the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008.