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.

“Also, with the advent of this debt coming back,” Berlinghof says, “the investment sales side of the business is taking off, and the sizes of the transactions are becoming larger, so in a lot of the cases we will arrange the debt for the buyer who is buying the property through Faris Lee Investment Sales.”

Currently, there are six people on the capital markets group, but Berlinghof anticipates the size of the team to grow significantly. They deal with all major asset types--“everything except hospitality and healthcare,” he says--though the focus remains retail, since that’s what Faris Lee Investments tends to bring in. Several deals outside retail, however, have already been closed, Berlinghof says.

“The commercial real estate market, although improving, is still saddled with many issues,” Rick Chichester, COO of Faris Lee Investments, said in a prepared statement. “This demands new and revitalized capital as well as a more strategic and disciplined financial approach to provide solutions to these issues.”

Overall, the focus of the group is to broaden already existing services that the firm offers.  “It gives Faris Lee the ability to really touch all of the points that a client needs,” Berlinghof says. “We can provide principal capital for transactions, we can provide investment sales services, and we can provide mortgage banking and equity services. That’s really the basis of it.”