NEW YORK CITY-Faris Lee Investments has launched a capital markets group to focus on providing recapitalization and debt structuring in the changing commercial real estate environment. Richard Berlinghof, who joined Faris in 2009, has been named managing partner and will head the new division.

Providing recapitalization “is a large part of our focus,” Berlinghof tells GlobeSt.com. “Eight or nine months ago now the capital markets really came back. What we’re finding is that we can procure securitized debt and then we can backfill that with equity so that we can get the recapitalizations done.”

The impetus behind creating the group, he says, came from the realization that a lot of existing distress--and opportunities--lay in property owners who were seeking to recap either individual properties or entire portfolios.