Jeff Coyne, Director
GRS | Corteq
(510) 962-9534
[email protected]
GRS Group has a major team at MBA’s CREF15. We spoke with Jeff Coyne, a business developer for the GRS | Corteq about what he is seeing from the show floor, including his perspective on life-company lending.
There was a panel that had a lot of discussion about life-company lending. Do you see it ramping up?
There is going to be growth. The lenders on the life insurance panel today said institutions with big capitalization were expecting growth of five percent to 10 percent. The smaller-capped firms said they expect to grow 50 to 100 percent year over year. Specifically, Protective Life said their allocation in commercial real estate was roughly $3 billion last year, which accounted for about seven percent of total portfolio assets. They’re looking to double that, and would like to go from $3 billion to $6 billion year over year.
How does that impact the GRS | Corteq’s business?
It means opportunity. It means the ability to do more deals. More than anything else, though, it is going to open GRS Group up to more borrowers. This gives us the opportunity to talk to more borrowers with high-quality, stabilized assets. These clients are a perfect client for GRS Group since they can take advantage of our full suite of services.
Are there any property types that were discussed?
Multifamily will continue to grow. Industrial, office and retail will continue picking up as well. And specialty areas, such as self storage and senior housing, will perform well. But multifamily doesn’t seem like it is going anywhere any time soon.
GRS Group is able to handle any property type in any location. Anything in particular picking up for you?
The place that we’re expanding out is selling different services to the same clients. Rather than just doing the environmental and engineering and title, we want to put it all in one package. Property-type wise, there is nothing new to the party that we haven’t done. We’d love to go broader and deeper with our clients and demonstrate our industry leading knowledge of how CRE deals get done – and where we play a vitally important and trusted role in that effort.
How do you think the mood is at MBA? Are you encouraged?
It’s hard to find a pessimistic person in San Diego in the short term. People here live year for year, and all indicators are that this year will be better than the last. They’re ready to go and are hitting the ground running. They have deals they want to get done and are already working on them with GRS Group. Lender meetings are packed. All of the mortgage brokers and bankers I’m talking to are meeting new and existing relationships back to back. There are a lot of people doing a lot of business here. It’s good news for Q1 2015, and we’re already seeing it.