John McNellis: The IRR is total crap. Here’s what I underwrite instead.
John McNellis co-founded McNellis Partners in the early 1980s and opened his first shopping center in Healdsburg in 1984, a center the firm still owns. Nearly 100 deals later, almost all of them supermarket-anchored neighborhood centers within a two-hour drive of San Francisco, the product has barely changed. The size has. Around 1990, after a […]
Bill Douglas: Own your data or somebody else will.
Bill Douglas spent his career applying industrial manufacturing playbooks to industries that hadn’t caught up yet. Eleven years ago he decided commercial real estate was exactly that kind of industry, and built OpticWise to close the gap. Today he’s CEO of a data and digital infrastructure company that positions itself as an operating partner to […]
Shlomo Chopp: Complexity is the opportunity. Binary thinking is the trap.
Shlomo Chopp got into distressed real estate the way a lot of people find their calling: out of necessity. In 2010, with no deals to be done and no formal finance training, this college dropout cracked open the CMBS loan documents, taught himself the intricacies of structured finance, and just went out and did it. […]
What Is DSCR, and Why Do Lenders Care About It?
Ask any commercial real estate lender what metric they care about most when underwriting a loan, and the answer is almost always the same: DSCR. Short for Debt Service Coverage Ratio, it’s a single number that tells lenders whether a property generates enough income to cover its debt payments, and it often determines whether a […]
LTC vs. LTV: Two Metrics That Sound the Same But Work Very Differently
In commercial real estate lending, two ratios come up in virtually every financing conversation: loan-to-cost (LTC) and loan-to-value (LTV). Both measure how much a lender is willing to finance relative to some baseline, but that baseline is different in each case, and so is the context in which each metric applies. Confusing the two is […]
Aleks Gampel: We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. We’re just trying to make it spin faster.
Aleks Gampel has executed over $2B in real estate transactions and held leadership roles in venture-backed companies, putting him at an unusual intersection of real estate, capital markets, and technology. On his own projects, he kept hitting the same wall: not enough skilled labor to build them. He looked at every industrialized construction option on […]
Derek Myron: It’s not what you make, it’s what you keep.
For California’s ultra-high-net-worth families, Derek Myron and Centura Wealth Advisory have moved well past traditional wealth management. While most advisors are still talking about portfolio allocation, Derek’s team is engineering tax outcomes, and the numbers are striking. A client earning $2 million in California income faces roughly $900,000 in taxes. Centura often brings forth material […]
Jay Rollins: People first, deal second – building platforms, not just portfolios
Jay Rollins has built and sold four companies over 40 years, from RTC-era distressed acquisitions to scaling GMAC’s Specialty Finance Group nationally, to growing JCR Capital to $1.6 billion in AUM before selling to Walker Dunlop in 2018. Now he’s doing something completely different with Canopy Real Estate Partners. Instead of building another massive fund, […]
Mark Roppolo: Two deals a year when nothing pencils, the power of patient capital allocation
Mark Roppolo and HFS Capital Partners operate with a discipline most institutional investors can’t afford: the ability to do just two deals in a year when nothing else makes sense. While traditional funds face pressure to deploy capital or return it to investors, HFS exists in a unique hybrid space—not quite a family office, not […]
Tony Yousif: I Haven’t Asked for Business in 10 Years – Lessons from Distressed Real Estate
Tony Yousif’s journey from Section 8 housing to becoming the go-to advisor for major institutions navigating distressed real estate reads like the ultimate American success story. But this isn’t just the rags-to-riches narrative—it’s the story of how Tony leveraged relationship-building to win in a transactional industry. While most brokers chase the next deal, Tony positioned […]
