NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ease Capital (“Ease”), a tech-enabled multifamily lender, founded by CRE Proptech veterans, Charlie Oshman, Memo Sanchez, and Ryan Simonetti, today announced a $450 million partnership with Taconic Capital Advisors (“Taconic”) to provide borrowers with bridge and bridge-to-permanent multifamily financing solutions ranging in size from $5.0 - $35.0 million. The venture follows Ease Capital’s recent launch of a new direct lending platform designed to support borrowers struggling with limited financing options.
While headlines are often dominated by large transactions, over 97% of multifamily properties in the United States are financed with loans under $30 million. This segment of the market, featuring nearly 40 times the number of properties and an average volume of $300 billion per year, has more recently been acutely impacted by rising interest rates and the broader challenges facing the banking sector.
“Traditional financial sources like banks and credit unions have pulled back, leaving borrowers to grapple with the issues arising from falling valuations and rising interest rates,” remarked Ryan Simonetti, Chairman of Ease Capital. “We are witnessing the most challenging real estate financing environment since the Global Financial Crisis. Ease Capital was created to alleviate the distinct pressures these borrowers face and provide them with the financing solutions they need to execute their business plans.”
Ease’s success is driven by its ability to provide borrowers with creative financing solutions, competitive rates and certainty of execution through a unique technology-driven credit screening processes and balance sheet capital in partnership with Taconic. Ease’s lending programs have a greater ability to service the myriad of needs of borrowers today including short-term, interest-only acquisition financing, bridge-off-construction and bridge-to-permanent financing for near stabilized assets.
“75% of transitional loans in the sub $30.0 million lending segment don’t close on the initially agreed upon terms between borrower and lender because the underwriting is done post application,” said Charlie Oshman, CEO of Ease Capital. “At Ease, our data system, comparable engine and proprietary risk-assessment system allows us and our partners at Taconic to do a comprehensive underwriting of every deal before a quote is ever sent, dramatically increasing the certainty of execution for our borrowers.”
Institutional investors eyeing the yield premium, low-risk profile, and sheer volume of the small-balance multifamily sector are drawn to Ease's platform and partnership driven model. Instead of grappling with the corporate overhead, transactional expenses, and significant operational complexities of building-out a direct lending capability, investors can partner with Ease to bring specific loan programs to market that meet their yield and credit requirements.
“Ease’s impressive tech, easy-to-use interface and service-driven approach with borrowers positioned them as the perfect partner to scale our direct multifamily lending investments,” said James Jordan, Portfolio Manager at Taconic. “Given the dislocation in the market and elevated maturities over the next 24 months, we see a massive opportunity to deploy capital in multifamily private credit and believe that more and more, commercial real-estate lending will be done by non-bank originators.”
Ease’s founders have built some of the largest success stories in Proptech over the last decade. Charlie Oshman and Memo Sanchez previously co-founded Reonomy, a commercial real estate data analytics company used by over 3,000 industry professionals, which was acquired by Altus Group, and Pragmic Technology, which was acquired by dv01. Ryan Simonetti founded Convene, the global hospitality company, with 40 locations across the US and UK. In addition to the partnership with Taconic, Ease raised $8.5 million in seed funding from leading Fintech, Proptech, and Insurtech investors including Brewer Lane, NineFour Ventures, Cambrian, Vera and Mischief last year.
About Ease Capital
Ease Capital is a technology-enabled commercial mortgage lender that provides the simplest way to finance multifamily real estate. Ease provides borrowers flexible financing solutions from $5.0 - $35.0 million on multifamily and mixed-use multifamily assets across the country. Founded by an experienced team with decades of real-estate lending, data and technology expertise, Ease is vertically integrated with hands-on asset management. Ease offers a range of fixed and floating rate loan products including bridge, bridge-to-perm, and permanent financing solutions for stabilized or near stabilized assets. Backed by leading institutional investors, Ease’s mission is to make real estate ownership more accessible. For more information, please visit www.easecapital.io.
About Taconic Capital Advisors
Taconic Capital Advisors is a global institutional investment firm that pursues an event-driven, multi-strategy investment approach designed to generate strong, risk-adjusted returns over multiple market cycles. Taconic was founded in 1999 by former Goldman Sachs partners Frank Brosens and Ken Brody. The firm has approximately $7 billion of total assets under management with offices in New York and London and more than 100 employees worldwide.
Taconic’s full-service commercial real estate platform invests in all asset classes and across the capital structure in both public and private markets. The strategy’s broad mandate offers flexibility to capitalize on shifting market opportunities, creating uncorrelated risk-adjusted return profiles for investors. Rooted in distressed and opportunistic investing, the team applies high-touch asset management capabilities to drive strong asset-level performance and capital market executions. Well-established relationships drive Taconic’s differentiated and diverse transaction sourcing channels which include local operating partners, investor partners and a broad network of lenders, CMBS special servicers, trading desks and brokerage houses.
Taconic’s series of closed-ended real estate funds are fully discretionary and have received over $1 billion in capital commitments. Investments to date across all Taconic funds total over $3 billion of gross asset value across roughly 175 distinct transactions. For more information, please visit www.taconiccap.com.
