Looking In

November 30, 2022 by

I am a managing director for seniors housing and healthcare at Lument. I split my responsibilities with another managing director, Casey Moore, and we basically wear three hats: first, we co-manage originators focused on seniors housing and healthcare in our west region. Second, we co-manage our Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac seniors housing business—working alongside bankers, the agencies, and underwriting. Finally, Casey and I are both bankers ourselves, and we originate new seniors housing business.

I’ve worked in the seniors industry for more than 20 years. I began at RED Capital, eventually joining Lancaster Pollard and finally landing at Lument. What really makes our space unique is that, as big as it might seem, it’s really a small niche business. I truly have enjoyed getting to know and work with our clients, partners, and third parties. In addition, I’ve always felt a connection with seniors, having been very close to my grandparents growing up. It’s wonderful to do business with high-quality owner and operators who are out there doing good work for their residents. I often refer to it as lending with a purpose, given the end benefit to seniors.

Throughout my career, I’ve seen a lot happen in the industry, but I don’t think anything could have prepared us for the pandemic. It was a rollercoaster. We spent a lot of time trying to help our clients and their seniors housing residents, who were top of mind. Casey and I adopted some new strategies, including expanding our responsibilities to co-manage the western region for seniors housing in the Spring of 2020. It was all very difficult, but fortunately, senior living operations have improved.

Throughout it all, Lument has remained a great fit for me for a number of reasons. For one, I’m an extrovert. I enjoy interacting with clients, colleagues, and business partners. Also, I have always enjoyed the rate lock process. The experience feels similar to a sports game, with rate locking being the fourth quarter winning touchdown. When you are finally able to complete the rate lock, it feels like a victory.

You may not know that, in addition to being a teacher, my father owned his own professional cleaning company—and I helped, starting at the age of five. From then until I left high school, I worked as a professional cleaner for numerous businesses in Zanesville, Ohio, including restaurants, doctors’ offices, and even commercial real estate companies. Let’s just say I’m the lead sweeper at my house, which my wife certainly enjoys and likely affords me more weekend time on the golf course.

September 7, 2022 by

I oversee several groups that make up Lument’s loan servicing operations: new loan boarding, audit system maintenance, surveillance, UCCs, escrow analysis, and quality assurance. These groups touch every loan within the portfolio and ultimately play a part in maintaining loan compliance and monitoring throughout the life of the loan.

Servicing is an essential part of Lument’s business operations, playing a dual role in both meeting our clients’ expectations and protecting the company from risk. We must balance the responsibilities of ensuring our clients are able to meet their loan obligations and providing great customer service to encourage them to borrow from us again.

Lument’s culture is probably the number one reason why I’m here. Every day is collaborative, with the opportunity to impact the company and drive change. I am on one of the best management teams in my career. Despite joining the team at the start of the pandemic, everyone has been welcoming, respectful, and truly cares about one another.

In addition to the culture, another thing I love about working at Lument is that real estate is tangible. You can see it, touch it, feel it. The property tells a story, and as you continue to monitor that collateral, it demonstrates its ability to support the loan and maintain value. And after a decade working in Asset Management, I was pleased to join the company and focus on various aspects of servicing to broaden my perspective of real estate finance.

Before I began at Lument, I took advantage of a wonderful opportunity: working in Ireland. I was very excited to travel across the world and live in a completely different culture. The purpose was to provide education, training, and a new management program for folks with little or no experience in U.S. real estate. We were given the opportunity to see new places and create new lifelong friendships. I believe my time in Ireland, the responsibilities I had, and the skills I gained helped prepare me for my current role at Lument.

Outside of work, I am a sports junkie. Some of my favorites are college football, NFL, and golf. We live and breathe sports in my household, either watching it on TV, enjoying our son’s youth games, or traveling to experience the events in person. We love the competitive atmosphere, exploring the cities and stadiums, and experiencing the local traditions for those teams.

August 31, 2022 by

I am the director of strategy on Lument’s business transformation team and work out of the New York office. My team focuses on driving Lument’s initiatives and invigorating how we operate. I also manage a multinational team of engineers and developers that supports loan servicing and asset management at the company.

My career in finance began at Merrill Lynch, where I split my time between working on the credit side of real estate debt and equity financing and assisting lawyers in asset recovery. I was putting in such crazy hours that my supervisors eventually insisted that I choose just one area to specialize in. I went with commercial real estate because the transactions seemed more real to me. Later, a former colleague suggested that I leave management consulting to join Hunt Real Estate Capital, one of Lument’s legacy companies, and that’s how my career at Lument began.

On the business transformation team, our goal is to make Lument’s work processes more efficient and effective. I want to make sure we are operating with the latest technology and all the available cutting-edge tools as we help leadership execute their long-term and strategic goals. For example, when Hunt, Lancaster Pollard, and RED Capital were unified under the Lument banner, I helped ensure that we could leverage our respective strengths to take the newly integrated company to the next level.

As a leader, I’m big on communication. This means being good at both talking and listening, as well as being open to and internalizing feedback. The next step I take is to patiently synthesize all the information I receive and use it to improve performance and make my team better. This translates into everything, allowing me to really connect with people—across all levels and on the other side of the negotiating table—be they a vendor, client, or an account manager.

One interesting thing about me is that I can read some radiographic film, like chest X-rays, and can sometimes tell if they show certain conditions such as COPD with emphysema. I picked this up at an administrative job in the radiology department at my alma mater’s university teaching hospital. I hung around the radiologists for long enough during resident teaching sessions to pick up some of what they were reading and detecting. A couple of physicians even tried to get me to take the MCAT and consider a career in medicine. However, I sometimes get queasy around surgical tools and blood, so I decided to stick with my accounting and finance majors.

August 25, 2022 by

I manage the day-to-day operations of the asset management team within Lument’s Real Estate Investment Strategies group. Our team oversees balance sheet loans—employing expertise and tools to service our loans and mitigate the risks in our portfolio.

You could say that I entered the commercial real estate industry by accident, but it was a happy accident. I accepted a lending assistant role at a local bank to support myself while I was looking for my first job after graduating from the University of North Texas with a B.S. in accounting. I enjoyed it and decided to stay.

After accumulating experience and responsibilities as a lending assistant, I was able to secure a role as a Fannie Mae asset manager at RED Capital, one of the Lument legacy companies. Shortly after beginning, I was offered the opportunity to manage balance sheet assets. I’ve been doing that for six years now, throughout the transition from RED to Lument.

I have a collaborative leadership style and I think it’s important to listen to my team’s ideas. For example, if they have a loan that needs to be modified, I think through the situation with them, listen to their thoughts and ideas about how to handle it, and collaborate to find a solution. My goal in this strategy is to use every challenge to build on my team’s knowledge and experience.

I’d like to think I play a mentor role at Lument, as mentorship is very important to me. To that end, I recently volunteered with the women’s network at the CRE Finance Council, an industry trade association, to mentor a younger woman. Because while there are more women in commercial real estate now, young women should have access to a more personal resource—someone who can answer questions, give advice, and listen to their concerns.

The most important mentor for me was my mom. She was a single mother, and life was not always easy for us. I was born in Kenya, and when I turned 12, she sacrificed everything to move us to the United States so I could get a better education. Just watching how hard my mother worked was a big motivator for me growing up. It really gave me a strong work ethic and I still draw inspiration from that.

August 25, 2022 by

As a managing director on the Real Estate Investment Strategies team, I manage Lument’s Propero® seniors housing private equity funds. This entails overseeing our existing funds and investment performance as well as the origination, underwriting, and closing of new investments. I am also the chief credit officer for the seniors housing balance sheet.

Our work is a vital part of how Lument continues to grow. One of our goals is to complement our HUD/FHA and agency offerings by deploying proprietary capital, in the form of debt and equity, for seniors housing. This provides our originations team with additional tools to support our clients’ business strategies and, on the debt side, further grows our permanent finance business.

After college, I began my career working as a lender in the middle market segment when I was approached to work on a multifamily mezzanine fund. I accepted that offer—at Lument predecessor RED Capital—and soon after I began concentrating on seniors housing. I enjoy that business, as it is very fulfilling to partner with experienced operators with an excellent track record and a passion for delivering high-quality care to older adults to serve the seniors housing community.

Another important part of my job has been the development of Propero. In 2013, I joined Lancaster Pollard to help build out the platform, doing everything from underwriting transactions and presenting them to the investment committee to overseeing investment exits. Propero is still going strong today, and I’m excited about its future. We have closed three funds so far and are currently in the process of fundraising for our fourth.

I’m always impressed by how much Lument supports us as we work with new investments and funds, and I think the results can be seen in the ongoing fundraising efforts for our fourth Propero series of funds. We’re always looking for ways to broaden our capabilities and further grow this business. We are aiming to considerably expand our product offerings in this fourth fund, which is really exciting.

One thing you may not know about me is that during my first year out of college, I played guitar in a band. We played for an MTV battle of the bands competition in Daytona Beach. And while it was a great experience and we finished third, it was apparent to me that my future was in finance, not rock and roll.

August 10, 2022 by

My team and I are responsible for processing the annual inspections due to the investor, processing the uniform commercial codes, and completing the new loan underwriting setup in RAMP. The primary goal is to ensure that each loan remains in compliance with the servicing guide and to ensure that the value of the property is maintained as collateral throughout the life of the loan.

I appreciate being able to choose my own leadership strategy at Lument, and I’ve always believed in leading by example. This dates to my time at the University of Kansas, where it was a huge honor for me to become a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first Black sorority. My experience there deeply reinforced for me the values of sisterhood, diversity, and equality—values that inform my daily role as a senior associate and which I am now passing on to my children.

Since graduating from Baker University with a BBA, I have worked in several different industries, and my experiences have varied widely. For instance, I worked at an engineering firm where even though I consistently took on more responsibilities and new roles, all my career moves seemed to be lateral. But this improved immediately after I accepted my first commercial real estate job and blossomed even further at Lument, where I see a more diverse group of Black women and men in leadership roles. It’s been exciting and refreshing to see.

We still have a long way to go. I believe diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) should be top-of-mind in all industries—not just commercial real estate. When you have a diverse workplace, people from different backgrounds can come together and share experiences in a comfortable setting. When people are comfortable, they open up to others and contribute more. Ideas and conversations flow more easily, and you end up with solutions that, as much as possible, meet everyone’s needs. I hope that I am contributing to making this a reality every day at Lument.

My children and I talk about DE&I a lot. What I would love to see, when they move on to enter their careers, is that they’re comfortable in their environment. I would like to see a world where my children fit in, feel accepted, and just know in their hearts that they belong.