NEW YORK CITY—Earlier this month, Lotus Capital Partners, a boutique investment banking firm launched in 2016 by industry veteran Faisal Ashraf, announced that it had arranged a $318- million capital stack to finance the construction and recapitalization of Via Mizner, a two-million-square-foot mixed-use project in downtown Boca Raton, FL. Currently in various stages of development, Via Mizner will include a 164-key Mandarin Oriental, the first new luxury hotel this Florida has seen in nearly a century and the largest Mandarin Oriental –branded project developed in the US over the past decade. The financing marks the largest in Florida this year.

“We win business a little differently than many of our peers,” Ashraf tells GlobeSt.com. “Ours is a story of career bankers and career distribution people that have come together to build a real estate capital markets advisory shop, and that's sort of counter-cyclical to what you typically see. You typically see an advisor aspire to be a debt fund or a hedge fund or a lender.

Ashraf, for example, ran the capital markets desk at Credit Suisse, and ran capital markets and large loan origination for Cantor Commercial Real Estate prior to founding Lotus, named after the flower that can blossom under adverse conditions. “I formed the company last year after a couple of years of thought and seeing how there's a massive void of high-quality advisories arranging capital,” he says.