How PACE Loan Group Is Redefining Commercial Real Estate Lending Through C-PACE

Transcript:

I was closing a deal in Mankato, Minnesota, and the client called me up about two weeks before closing and said, "Hey, Rafi, I want to use PACE on my property." And I've never heard of PACE before. Didn't think anything of it, and then two weeks later, a buddy of mine calls me up and he's like, "Hey,  Rafi, what do you know about PACE? It's new. It's cool. It's interesting. It's innovative. I want to use it." Like, I'm moving back to Minnesota. Why don't we just start a PACE company? And that's how PACE Loan Group began.

What excites me about PACE Loan Group as a provider of this product? It's just fun. You get us the whole way through. We service our loans. We keep them in-house, so you get to deal with the same people from the day you start talking to an originator until the day you successfully sell your asset off and go on to your next cool project. We have purposely curated an excellent group of people, and it's hard to find people who are both really good at what they do and quirky and authentically themselves. But we try to create that sort of culture because that matters more than anything else. We are our unique individual selves. We are the happy island of Misfit Toys, and it is just wonderful how we can each bring our own unique personalities and perspectives in, and everybody is respected for it and admired for it. We work very closely together. You're not going to get passed along from person to person. You'll have that continuity of working with, for instance, your loan originator or your underwriter. We have a depth of knowledge in a very small number of people, which is odd to find in a company of our size. It's amazing to me the breadth of expertise that our clients actually have access to. I don't think any other PACE lender really can offer that. From a client perspective, you need to know who you're dealing with, and you want to know that you're talking to decision makers, you're talking to people that actually can get something done, or at least deliver on what they say they're going to be able to deliver on. PACE has gotten much more institutionalized over the past 5 years, which is great for the industry, but with that, a lot more red tape. You know, you think about, you know, some of our peers that are out there, they're great shops, but they are owned by massive insurance companies or massive private equity shops that have hundreds of billions of dollars of AUM, and PACE is just the tiniest of slivers within that portfolio.

And so when you think about a loan getting done in that system, the layers of approval are vast, and the decision makers are not all that clear. At PLG, we benefit from being independently operated while still having institutional backing. So, we pride ourselves on being able to be nimble, to be flat, to have transparency, to be able to know that when we're signing up the deal, it's already been seen and been blessed internally. We are brick-and-mortar lenders. We understand core real estate fundamentals, and that's what makes us successful. We are writing real estate loans within the energy efficiency space, and that's great, but we bring both sides to the equation.

We have the real estate experts. We have the policy experts, and that's what makes PLG so successful. I hope our clients say, "Wow, that was easier than I thought it was going to be."