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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I work on the Office Services team at Lument’s New York office. It’s our responsibility to ensure that everyone’s work lives run smoothly—whether we’re setting up a new office space, helping with moves and transitions, or making sure our pantry is well stocked. We are also in charge of mail, shipping, and printing. While our work may not always be glamorous, I enjoy it a lot, and it plays an essential role in making everyone’s job a little easier.

I’ve worked at Lument and its predecessor companies for more than ten years. My journey here began over twenty years ago when I emigrated to the U.S. from Dominica, an island in the Caribbean, in 2000. I found a job at Lument legacy company Centerline in 2011 through an agency. When Hunt acquired Centerline, they hired us full time, and I’ve been here ever since.

Our work has remained consistent even throughout the pandemic—especially when we moved from the 23rd floor to the 20th floor at 230 Park Avenue. We came into the office about once a week to make sure the move went well and that the space was ready for everyone’s eventual return. I’m happy with the way things turned out; everything looks great and is running smoothly so far since we began our full hybrid work schedule.

The Office Services team is given a fair amount of leeway when it comes to how we do our jobs. If we see a better way of doing things, we are encouraged to go for it. It’s satisfying to take charge of a project and make sure everything is done to a high standard.

For instance, I’m responsible for stocking the pantry, and I make sure that when someone comes to look for something, it’s there. I don’t even like to run out of forks! And of course, there always has to be coffee.

But more than anything else, it’s the people that make working at Lument so great. It’s no secret at the New York office that I had a heart transplant four years ago, and it means a great deal that no one ever treats me differently because of it.

These days I can pretty much do everything anyone else can do. Before the pandemic, I regularly went to the gym or walked eight miles every morning—and while I’m not walking as much as I used to yet, I’m looking forward to getting back to it.

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My team and I are responsible for distributing all the agency, FHA, and municipal products that Lument originates. On the agency and FHA side, our market is large Wall Street firms and regional broker/dealers. For municipal transactions, we work with larger mutual funds and money managers.

To keep our deals flowing and maintain our pricing and volume, we must be able to gauge the market. As a result, everyone on our team keeps in close contact with our broker/dealer counterparties. We do everything we can to pass our insights and intelligence to our origination group to help them better understand market dynamics.

We place a premium on building relationships based on trust. Our originators can be confident in the guidance we provide on a complicated credit, and the street can be confident that the product that results will work out fairly for them.

All this works because we have a great team. Our people are very, very good at what they do. As a director, I am as hands-off as I can possibly be while ensuring that we scrupulously adhere to guidance from FINRA and the SEC.

One of the things I’m most proud of is the way we merged the trading desks of our three legacy companies. When ORIX closed the Hunt acquisition in April 2020, each company’s trading desk had its own distinct ways of doing business and traded the whole gamut of products. Because the combined firm was so big, we decided to have a dedicated set of traders for Fannie Mae, Ginnie Mae, and municipal securities. We worked as a group to make sure we picked the best people for each product and established uniform procedures. The result: an outstanding year for the trading desk and Lument as a whole.

You might be surprised to learn that I didn’t initially plan on a career in finance. I was about to graduate college with an engineering degree—I even had an offer in hand—when I decided that I didn’t want to be an engineer. I started exploring business, and a vibrant professor sparked my interest in financial markets. After graduating, I took a job in the field and found that I really liked the challenge of trading securities and responding to market dynamics—making my eventual career at Lument a perfect fit.

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Lument is a subsidiary of ORIX Corporation USA. Securities, Investment Banking and Advisory Services provided through Lument Securities, LLC, Member FINRA/SIPC. *Investment advisory services are provided by Lument Investment Management, LLC, registered as an investment adviser with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.