Wayne Brandt
Nomura Securities International
Age: 36
Specialty: Real estate investment
Recent Deal: $50 million first mortgage on Mariners Village in Marina del Rey
Wayne Brandt’s middle name ought to be “securitization.”
In 1990, Brandt, who heads Nomura’s Los Angeles real estate division, was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Real Estate, working on a thesis about a new way of raising investment capital called debt securitization.
Almost unheard of at that point, the concept had come about a few years earlier. A raft of new tax codes in 1986 effectively did away with the old syndication method of raising money (getting funds from an array of contributors big and small). So real estate investors were looking for alternatives.
“People had talked about (securitization), but no one ever really used it. But I thought it was interesting,” said Brandt.
Debt securitization involves the same concept as equity securitization used by real estate investment trusts. But instead of selling equity securities backed by a portfolio of properties, as REITs do, debt securitization involves selling bonds secured by long-term, fixed-rate commercial mortgages.
Debt securitization is now used in about half of all long-term, fixed-rate financing for commercial realty. Brandt is at the forefront of the movement. He heads a 20-person group at Nomura and has closed more than $3 billion in real estate financings, which he is responsible for structuring and underwriting.
Brandt had intended to pursue a career in banking and finance. After graduating with a political science degree from Stanford University in 1984, he joined J.P. Morgan & Co. in New York as a corporate finance trainee and was transferred to Houston to work on oil and gas mergers and acquisitions.
While there, he was lured by a college friend to the Dallas office of Trammell Crow Co., a national commercial real estate company. In 1987, he was transferred to Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, a Trammell subsidiary. By 1990, with Wyndham’s assets feeling the strain of a declining real estate market, Brandt decided to take a break and earn a master’s degree at MIT, where he became interested in securitization.
Upon graduation, Brandt joined Nomura’s fledgling securitization group.
Wade Daniels
