Commercial Briefs

MBA (10/13/2008 ) Murray, Michael
Centerline Capital Group, a New York-based commercial real estate investor, and ZAIS Group, a Red Bank, N.J.-based structured products manager, formed a new venture to pursue investments in the commercial mortgage-backed securities market. ZAIS Group spoke last summer with Centerline about co-investment opportunities. Both firms said attractive opportunities exist in the commercial real estate debt markets.

The new venture would allow Centerline to "deploy the capital necessary to realize the high-quality investment returns still available in the current marketplace,” said Mark Brown, senior managing director and head of CMBS and commercial products business group at Centerline Capital Group.
John Jardine, managing director at ZAIS Group, said the CMBS sector provides some of the best risk-adjusted returns in the commercial real estate investment market. “We believe the appropriate strategy is to focus on private, 144a securities, conduct a fundamental re-underwriting of every asset within a loan pool and leverage Centerline’s proprietary systems, exchanging real-time asset and market information with our servicing partner,” Jardine said.