His search brought him to Kuwait, where he and founding principal Edward Hamilton put together a relationship with publicly traded Al Mal Investment. In turn, the controlling shareholder of Al Mal is Al-Kheir Holding Co., belonging to the Al-Kharafi Family, one of the largest conglomerates in the Middle East and North Africa region, with sales in excess of $5 billion annually.

Al Mal, says Singer, has been largely responsible "for helping us raise capital throughout the MENA region. The strategy that I've been able to sell throughout the Middle East was a very simple one: the major markets in the US and Western Europe were going to be repriced and were also going to be deleveraged, so the need for new equity was going to be significant. And the ability to put new equity into high-quality, income-producing assets, maybe for the first time in two decades, was really going to be the crucial capital."

Up until the downturn, securitization was the lead dog in commercial real estate financing. "If you had a little bit of equity, you could control a lot of real estate," Singer says. "That's all changing—changing in a slow process, but it's changing. And that's what our strategy and thesis circles around. We very much look ourselves as an equity investor that wants to help the ownership community. They're now going to need new equity money, so let's become a source. I've been very successful in Kuwait in being able to articulate and demonstrate why there is significant risk-adjusted return in that kind of investing." Both today and in the next few years.

Singer notes that Eastbridge Al Mal's fundraising isn't limited to the MENA region. "We're working on raising money in other parts of the world from sovereign governments and wealthy companies," he says. "Around the world, there's finally a sense that the US is going to come back."

To date, Eastbridge Al Mal has concentrated on fundraising. "We've been very slow to enter the market because we're watching it go through this process, which also has been slow," says Singer. "Financial institutions have not been forced to restructure some of the loans they have on their books. But over the next five years, there will be over $1 trillion in mortgage debt that comes due in this country. It's going to get worked through in one way or another. We'd like to be part of recapitalizing a lot of that mortgage debt."