Knight Capital Group expanded its ABS/MBS capabilities in commercial real estate (CRE) finance with the hiring of Barry Funt and Winston van Buitenen as managing directors.
Before Knight, Funt spent 9 years at Natixis Real Estate Capital, formerly known as CDC/IXIS, where he helped build the firm’s commercial real estate finance unit.
Prior to Natixis, he was the general counsel of Nomura Securities International’s CRE finance business.
Previous to being par of the CRE finance group, Funt worked on the repo desk and engaged in both treasury repos as well as whole-loan gestation repo financing.
He began his career as an associate at Thacher Proffitt & Wood and Donovan Leisure Newton and Irvine.
van Buitenen was the co-founder and managing director of Allegiance Investment Advisors,
which specializes in all forms of credit based real estate lending including CTL, mezzanine, tax- exempt bond offerings and public incentivized financing structures.
He was a founding member of The Norseman Group, a structured finance firm focused exclusively on offering first lien and secondary debt solutions to purchasers and owners of credit tenanted commercial net lease properties.
Prior to this, van Buitenen held senior roles at Sony, where he led several large-scale integration and real-estate projects, Loews Theaters, as executive vice president and COO and at Price Waterhouse.
The CRE finance team will leverage Knight’s institutional fixed-income platform to originate real estate loans for leased-backed and project financings of all types. The team will offer creative structuring advice on deals to achieve the economic and qualitative project goals of participating landlords and tenants.
“Barry and Winston bring considerable experience to Knight in the CRE market.” said Ronak
Khichadia, managing director, global head of ABS/MBS at Knight Libertas. “Using Knight’s
extensive client network of leading buy-side firms, they will be able to execute across the credit
spectrum, undertake both large and small transaction sizes, structure taxable and tax-exempt real estate financings, and flexibly tailor structures to meet project objectives.”
Knight provides buy-side firms with research, sales and trading across a broad range of fixed income securities. Knight trades in securities that include ABS/MBS, high yield/distressed, bank loans, among other things.
