Neptune has offices in San Diego and Dallas. HREC has offices in Denver, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Tampa, Boca Raton and Memphis. Armstrong, who prior to founding Neptune in 2001 was senior managing director of the hospitality practice at Insignia/ESG Hotel Partners, says the merger combines firms with complementary services and locations, "which should lead to more opportunities in the market."

Armstrong

HREC president Geoff Davis says Neptune's debt, structured finance and equity work complements what HREC is doing and where he and Cahill are headed with the practice. That path includes a new group focused specifically on note sales.

"Given Neptune's capital markets orientation we will have a national push on that," Davis says. "A lot of what we are doing right now is refinancing, finding non-apparent lenders to refi[nance] assets. A number of owners and lenders are facing maturity defaults and will need to be recast or restructured. Secondly, a lot of clients have options to buy their own paper back at a discount, and we are working on those scenarios with both recourse and non-recourse lenders."