Commercial Real Estate Direct Staff Report

Mount Street U.S., whose servicing portfolio has grown to roughly $38 billion, is aiming to double that by next year.

To help orchestrate that growth, the nearly six-year-old unit of London-based Mount Street Group has added Rawle Howard, a technology entrepreneur with a deep background in commercial real estate finance, as managing director to lead the platform. Howard joins from CREcentric, a deal and investment-management platform that he had founded and where he was chief executive.

At CREcentric, he led the development and implementation of artificial intelligence enabled data management and workflow processes for its commercial real estate investor clients. He previously was with Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, where he was European head of private real estate debt, and BlackRock Financial Management, where he was in a similar role. Howard was a star football player while attending Lafayette University, where he played middle linebacker during the early 1990s. He later played professionally for the New York Jets.

While at BlackRock, Rawle was a client of Mount Street, one of the largest commercial real estate loan servicers in Europe, with more than $166.2 billion of assets under management. Then, when he moved into the prop-tech sector as an entrepreneur, Mount Street became a client.

Mount Street’s growth ambitions in the United States recognize the increasing participation among debt funds and life insurance companies in the lending market. Those lenders typically don’t have captive servicing operations. What’s more, many will provide loans with complex structures, including construction loans, in which Mount Street specializes.

“We want to do here, in the United States, what we’ve done in Europe,” explained Paul Lloyd, co founder and chief executive of Mount Street. Since founding the company in 2013, Lloyd has pitched the company’s ability to serve as “partner” with clients. “We add value” to clients’ mortgage assets, he said. The company also services corporate debt, aviation loans and other loan types. It specializes in loans that require high-touch servicing.

Lloyd in 1997 had launched Morgan Stanley’s European mortgage servicing operation. He later moved to Deutsche Bank, where he launched its CMBS servicing and special servicing platform. And in 2009, he took over as head of servicing in Europe for CBRE.

Howard’s “ability to bridge the gap between real estate finance and technology, combined with his exceptional leadership qualities, make him a transformative force in the CRE industry,” Lloyd explained.

Dean Wheeler, managing director of corporate operations in the U.S., who joined the company last June, reports to Howard.