CHICAGO-Cohen Financial, based here, has created a national equity placement practice, with Kevin O’Grady promoted to senior managing director as the lead and the hire of a few new professionals across the country. The company has also formed a formal partnership with New York City-based Artis Advisors LLC, moves that O’Grady says will allow the firm to marry at least $800 million with to commercial real estate borrowers this year.
O’Grady, based in Miami, will lead the new practice that will place programmatic and discretionary equity from its sources of family offices, private equity firms, opportunity funds and institutional capital providers and offer investment for opportunities ranging from $50 million to $350 million. The practice will work with privately-owned commercial real estate property investment firms with large expansion programs for value-add properties.
He tells GlobeSt.com that there’s an abundance of equity capital in the market in early 2012, but with varying degrees of placement. “These private firms, opportunity funds and high-net-worth buyers are competing against each other for properties,” O’Grady says. “Over the past couple of years, it’s been a desert with regard to ground-level real estate, most of the transaction volume has been with large companies. Our practice can match capital to operators at the ground level.”
Cohen had completed $400 million in equity placement projects in 2011, including some preliminary deals with Artis. The new partnership is more formal, O’Grady says. “They are hanging their securities license under our broker dealer, we have a fee-sharing arrangement with regard to placement, and a co-marketing effort,” he says. “Before it was deal-by-deal, we were dating. We’re not married, but we’re living together, you could say.”
His firm is hiring three equity placement professionals in its Los Angeles office: John Carrick, Robert Lindner and Matthew Jensen. Also, O’Grady says Cohen will hire professionals in New York City and Dallas this year. “We’re going to have a bear hug around the country, on the West and East Coasts, down South here in Miami, in the Southwest and our headquarters area in the Midwest,” he says.
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