Covenant bets on capital markets with new CIO

Covenant Capital Group has named Jeremy Goldberg managing director and chief investment officer, a Sept. 8, 2026, appointment that places a 30-year capital-markets career atop the Nashville multifamily manager's investment team and reads as a statement of where the firm expects the next cycle to be won.

Goldberg arrives from StepStone Group, where he led relationships with major public pension clients, handled due diligence across U.S. real estate strategies, and served as the team's multifamily specialist. IREI reports he brings with him the experienced team that built custom solutions for institutional investors there, meaning allocators will be answering to a group he has already assembled.

Before StepStone he ran corporate finance and investor relations at Associated Estates Realty Corp., a publicly traded apartment REIT, where his scope included follow-on equity offerings, secured and unsecured debt placements, and investor and sell-side analyst relationships. Across both stops, the work was raising money.

At Covenant the mandate tracks that background, with Goldberg leading the capital markets and transactions team, overseeing lender relationships, execution of property purchases, refinancings and dispositions, and debt strategy, and joining the investment committee.

The job description is financing, and the direction of the move makes the point concrete: StepStone sits on the allocator side of private markets while Covenant deploys invested capital into apartment buildings, so Goldberg will have seen a Covenant-style deal from both sides of the diligence table. That two-sided view is the point of the hire, and it fits a cycle in which pricing holds up on capital rotation while rent growth stalls and bids chase scale. A CIO who can price a refinancing and speak the pension fund's language answers that condition directly.

The wager inside the appointment is that capital structure, not property operations, will be the binding constraint on multifamily returns over the next several years, and that a sponsor whose investment committee includes the person running lender relationships clears the refinancing wall on better terms than competitors. The verdict will show up outside the press release: in senior loan pricing, mezzanine thickness, and the maturity runway of Covenant's next acquisition financing.