Canyon Partners Real Estate hires Related's Chad Goodman to lead eastern, central credit origination

Canyon Partners Real Estate has hired Related Fund Management's Chad Goodman to lead credit origination across the Eastern and Central U.S., the second regional lending head it has named this year in a bet that the lender who reaches sponsors first writes the terms. Commercial Observer first reported the move, which puts Goodman in the firm's New York office as head of eastern and central region credit.

Goodman arrives with a lending resume weighted toward transitional paper. At Related Fund Management, a $14.0 billion regulatory-assets-under-management platform, he spent the past six years originating loans for opportunistic and transitional strategies, the segment where pricing is least standardized and a lender's edge is seeing the deal first. Before Related in March 2020, he spent nearly 12 years at Westport Capital Partners working loans across U.S. property sectors, and before that at Bear Stearns across mortgage-backed securities and structured products.

"Chad brings extensive experience sourcing and structuring complex real estate investments across market cycles, making him a strong addition to our growing credit platform," Jacob Feingold, partner and head of originations for Canyon Partners Real Estate, said in a statement. "Expanding our origination capabilities in the Central and Eastern U.S. will allow us to deepen our relationships with borrowers and sponsors."

The hire follows Canyon's June addition of Scott Swisher from Acore Capital as a managing director and head of western region credit originations, which Commercial Observer also reported, and comes alongside appointments of Adam Ostrowsky from Mack Real Estate Group as a managing director of capital markets and Scott San Filippo from Heitman as a senior director of bridge debt.

The four hires stack up as a platform buying origination capacity rather than balance sheet: each came from a firm that originates its own loans — Related, Acore, Mack, Heitman — which is where the borrowers and sponsors already sit. Origination is the scarce input right now; the refinancing wall is being rolled through extensions and structured capital instead of resolved through sales, which means the lender that reaches a sponsor first writes the terms. A named head for the Eastern and Central regions is a bid for the front of that queue.

Canyon is already lending in the territory those hires will cover, with a $67 million refinancing on the Kurv Elizabeth industrial asset at $240 a foot and a $74.7 million senior construction loan alongside J.P. Morgan on 180 build-to-rent townhomes in Riverside — sponsor-facing, transitional deals of the type a regional origination head is meant to find first.

The coverage does not say how much new lending capacity the two regional heads are meant to support, whether Canyon intends to raise fresh capital behind them, or what dollar target, if any, the platform has set — the number that would tell a borrower how badly Canyon wants the next deal.