KeyBanc Capital Markets' (KBCM) recently hired Joseph McHale as managing director to its MBS sales and trading group, as reported on May 12 by StructuredFinanceNews.com (see
According to Brian Brennan, managing director and head of the team, this is a "continuation of KBCM's fixed-income growth in our structured products area. We have tried to align our trading and sales support as closely as possible to our parent KeyBank."
Currently, KBCM has eight offices across the country and has 56 sales professionals across the trading and investment team that Brennan heads.
Brennan said that his team at KBCM is planning to add 20 professionals to the sales group across the various areas such as municipals, high yield and investment grade credit. Included in this number are potential five additional mortgage specialist hires.
"We’re going to hire specialized sales people in the mortgage market to capture all areas of the secondary mortgage world," he said. "We do feel that because KeyBank has some origination capabilities with CRE that we can continue to grow meaningfully in that area."
CRE Capabilities
KeyBank Real Estate Capital currently has a strong commercial real estate (CRE) origination platform.
"We feel that we can support that group in a distribution and trading capacity," Brennan said. "The group originates many loans that can possibly fit CMBS transactions and the bank also has significant multifamily origination that ties into GNMA project loan and other types of FNMA DUS opportunities." Other key trading areas he mentioned were agency and non-agency CMOs as well as specified and hybrid ARMS.
Brennan sees opportunities in both the residential and commercial side. "We all know how broad the MBS market is and there is ample and sustained opportunities whether it be in RMBS and CMBS," Brennan said. "We feel that we can grow our sales force in terms of the secondary mortgage market."
According to Brennan, they view non-agency mortgages and subprime credit as markets that will offer some investor flow and that the firm can participate in.
"The investor continues to look for product in all types of securitized product," he said. The investor base is looking for investment opportunities, both on the primary and secondary markets."
