Hilco Real Estate Finance, an institutionally-backed real estate bridge lender, launched to provide short-term property finance for the UK market. The group will be led by co-founders Brad Altberger as CEO and Max Lewis as chief investment officer.
“As a team of experienced lenders, we seek to understand our clients’ property assets and funding requirements and to offer speedy, flexible and reliable short-term financing solutions for all property types across the United Kingdom,” Altberger said.
“As capital gaps continue to materialize in the real estate financing landscape, HREF is finding an increasing number of opportunities to deploy its flexible finance to assist our clients,” Lewis said.
As a team, Hilco Real Estate Finance will provide loans ranging from £1 million ($1.29 million) to £50 million ($64.5 million) and loan-to-value ratios of up to 75%.
Altberger is an experienced investor and lender across multiple real estate asset classes and has been involved in the acquisition and/or disposition of more than $10 billion of assets, including real estate, mortgage portfolios and companies. As a partner at Micota Capital, he made real-estate-backed bridge loans in addition to equity investments in real estate and real-estate-backed operating businesses. Altberger also was a London-based managing director of GI Partners, where he sat on the investment committees of funds with more than $3 billion of equity commitments.
Prior to co-founding Hilco Real Estate Finance, Lewis was at Arrow Global, where he led a specialist lending franchise. Lewis previously set up two bridge lending programs in the UK, as well as programs in Portugal, the Netherlands and Ireland. He started his credit investment activities at the specialist credit investment fund JP Morgan Principal Strategies and previously worked at Rothschild in M&A and financial restructuring.
In addition to Altberger and Lewis, the Hilco Real Estate Finance team includes Andrew Ward and Sean Adams as managing directors. Ward joined Hilco Real Estate Finance after having previously headed specialist lenders Bergen Capital and Reparo, and Adams joined from Interbridge, where he served as chief commercial officer.
“Growing our successful bridge lending practice into the UK market is a natural next step to expand Hilco Real Estate’s business,” Neil Aaronson, CEO of Hilco Real Estate and chairman of Hilco Real Estate Finance. “With over 20-plus years of experience in the industry, Hilco Real Estate has become known to business owners and advisors alike as the experienced, strategic partner to trust. We see this as a seamless extension of that reputation.”
