Evan Bell is Managing Partner and co-founder of Lorimer Capital, a direct portfolio lender that provides creative financing solutions for commercial real estate opportunities across the eastern U.S. He has over two decades of expertise in structured real estate credit products and started his career as a real estate finance attorney, representing major institutions like Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Lehman Brothers, and Wachovia Bank on mortgage and mezzanine financings, which totaled over $10 billion.
Prior to launching Lorimer Capital, Evan served as co-founder and Principal of Unity Capital, where he played a major role in leading the company to success and sustained growth. He earned his B.A. from the State University of New York at Albany and received his J.D. from Hofstra University School of Law. While there, he was a member of the Hofstra Law Review and a recipient of Westlaw's Corpus Juris Secundum Award.
Insights from Evan Bell on Relationships and Discipline in Real Estate Financing
Evan Bell started his first day of work on September 10th, 2001. By the next morning, everything had changed. That jarring introduction to his career taught him early that you can't control what happens to you, but you can control how you respond. Fast forward two decades, and that philosophy has guided him from law firms to launching Unity Capital with "very little clue" what he was doing, to now building Lorimer Capital with partners he's known for years.
In this episode of The Dealmakers' Edge, Evan talks candidly about why he still puts his own money in every deal, how he went from doing small multifamily loans to closing $51 million construction deals with developers like Kushner Companies, and why he tells young people to treat everyone with respect because you never know where careers will lead. He also opens up about managing the stress of high-stakes lending by reading philosophy, keeping perspective, and remembering that "everyone's got their bag of problems no matter how great they look when you see them out at lunch."
1:55 – Evan's childhood, educational background, and career transitions
7:33 – The current cycle for private credit lenders and discipline as essential for navigating market cycles
11:16 – Relationship-based business as paramount to long-term success in real estate finance
14:42 – Evan's thought process when looking at dealmaking opportunities right now
18:03 – Prioritization and focus of Evan and his partners as they continue to grow the firm
20:36 – The key to navigating anxiety in a high-stress industry
25:57 – The importance of showing up and staying in the mix to build a business
Mentioned In Why Relationships and Discipline Matter Most in Real Estate Financing with Evan Bell
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
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Transcript
Aaron Strauss: You're listening to The Dealmakers' Edge with A.Y. Strauss, diving deep into stories behind commercial real estate leaders.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Dealmakers' Edge. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Evan Bell, a good friend of mine who recently co-founded Lorimer Capital earlier this year. Evan previously spent over a decade as co-founder and principal at Unity Capital. Unity Capital is a direct portfolio lender providing bridge, construction, and mezzanine financing for commercial real estate nationwide, specializing in fast, flexible, and creative loan solutions ranging from $2 million to $100 million plus, often closing deals in days. Their experienced leadership brings decades of experience in real estate finance and investment.
Evan, earlier in his career, practiced as a real estate finance attorney representing large financial institutions at major firms in New York, and also was an executive at a large private real estate bridge lender. We're going to talk in this episode about his transition from Unity to the new company, Lorimer, where he moved from small to mid-sized balanced loans to more mid to larger loan sizes. We're also going to cover deal fundamentals, how he thinks about transacting, core operating principles, and how he's built some great relationships and maintains those relationships in the market. So I hope you enjoy the episode and here we go.
Hello, everybody. Welcome to The Dealmakers' Edge. I'm very excited to be joined by a very close personal friend of mine, Evan Bell, who I go way back with. Way back. Admittedly, it's a bit awkward doing a business interview with a close personal friend. But when your close personal friend is a very successful business person, it makes natural sense. I'm excited to showcase what you're up to, Evan, and get your story out there. You've really been doing some amazing things career-wise, especially as of late, you've really taken a big leap in your career.
We want to get your story out a little bit. So, to that end, maybe we start with a couple of minutes, just personal background, talk about where you grew up, where you went to school, then maybe that first job we got at Proskauer. Then from there, we kick off the lending part.
Evan Bell: Yeah, sure. I mean, I guess I'll start at the beginning. Born in Brooklyn and born in Mitchell-Lama Housing, actually, first few years of my life, which were developed by the father of the current president of the United States. So it was an interesting beginning. My parents were really young when they had me, and my father was working his way through podiatry school. So we moved out to Long Island, which is where I really grew up when I was in about first grade on the south shore of Long Island.
Great place to grow up, Merrick, New York. From there, state school. I was just good enough of a student or worked just hard enough to get like a B-plus type average. So went on to state school and didn't really know what I wanted to do. I was a business major for a minute. I guess once I realized I wasn't cut out to be like an econ major, went with what I liked and decided to go to law school, ended up a history major, and then ended up in law school.
Law school is great. I went back home to Long Island. I was at Hofstra University Law School. It was a great experience for me. When I graduated in 01, I think initially my plan was to be a corporate lawyer. That was my plan. 9-11 happened the second day of work for me. So I started my first day of work on September 10th, 2001. The firm I worked for at the time was downtown, right by the towers. So it was a pretty horrific welcome to New York.
Once things started to settle down a little bit, the corporate world dried up, at least for legal work. That early real estate bubble that ended up popping in 2008 was just starting to inflate. I know you're the same age as me, so we remember that period pretty well early in our careers. I ended up at a firm called Proskauer and was there for several years, and it was just an amazing education. It was in the middle of the boom, representing a lot of lenders on CMBS origination, which was the rage at the time.
But not just CMBS, we were doing bridge, construction, joint ventures, partnerships. I got to do some equity sides, even some leasing. So it was a really great real estate education. Before the market crashed, I ended up in-house for an early bridge lender, which I didn't even know was a thing, a private real estate lending company. Worked there for several years through the bust of 08. When the dust settled on that, I started to think about what the next phase of my career was going to be. Didn't really want to go back to a law firm, but never really thought about being a business guy and just fell into it.
I met my first partner, my first business partner, probably about 2013. I started Unity Capital, co-founded it with him in 2014. We closed our first loan in early 2015. I had very little clue what I was doing at the time. But I knew the legal background of it. Had no relationships. We started doing small and mid-balance bridge loans. First, we started in New York City and in the surrounding areas. Then we just started going where the deals took us. So first, we were doing only multifamily. Then we started doing some retail. We started doing some medical office. We started going up and down the East Coast.
It was great. It was really great. It was all of our own money and had no outside investors. It was a really good introduction. Fast forward to post-COVID, I started to partner up on a deal-by-deal basis with my current partners in my new venture, Lorimer Capital. We've now, which is my partners, Erez and Ilan Rubinstein, two brothers who grew up in Canada. We've been friends for a very long time. We started doing one-off deals together that were bigger than Unity, my old company, was doing.
It worked really well. It was a great relationship, great partnership from day one. We closed our first deal together in 2020 and just started doing more and more and more, and so my capital partners went from capital partners to institutional partners, and that gets us to today. We launched Lorimer Capital officially in January, February this year. Got about somewhere around 300 million in-house closed loans, and we've got several more already signed up in the pipeline. So it's a great time to be in business, and you know, we're having a lot of fun. It's exciting.
Aaron Strauss: It is exciting. I've really watched every step of the way. None of it has been a surprise. It always makes perfect sense looking backwards. But at the time and all those different crossroads, you know, it seems like you made the right call and continue to do so. You also have a great track record on your loans too. I know at Unity, you always had the discipline. The market got really frothy. We talked about that a lot. A lot of people were just excited to be in the space and make a decent yield.
But that discipline probably, if I had to guess, was a core component of how you were able to perform and then attract a higher quality, not only of borrower, of loan, of the market, but continue to get the confidence of the market that A, you're a good capital provider, but you're also a steward of capital for your partners. So to give credit where credit is due, you've also had a really strong track record of closing and executing and not just getting overly excited about any one particular deal at any time, which is obviously not easy to do.
So that's hard.
Evan Bell: Yeah, there's a lot of FOMO in this business to win the deal.
Aaron Strauss: Yeah, and the market has been frothy. I mean, like we talk about, it's a really great period for smart private credit to come in, bridge lenders to come in and solve for that gap while the regional banks and the traditional market has been softer. Maybe we're at a peak. I don't know. It's hard to say.
Are you seeing, I mean, you're seeing a lot of deal flow right now, maybe even more than you saw a year ago, but maybe you can try to give a snapshot of where we are cyclically from a private lender perspective.
Evan Bell: It's a great question. I'm always wrong.
Aaron Strauss: Somehow, you've made it right.
Evan Bell: Yeah, but I don't have any special knowledge. Nobody does. I can't call the cycle or where we are in it or when it's going to end or the new one's going to begin. I think it is a great time to be in private credit. I think the pie is smaller in the post-inflationary environment, but private lenders are taking a bigger piece of the pie than ever before.
So from that standpoint, it's exciting. I also think that because we can be, and I put myself in the category of just the general private credit world, which is a huge space at this point, much bigger than it is when I started doing this over a decade ago, and it's been amazing to watch, you know, we're able to transact with a very high caliber of borrower. That's been really an amazing part of the last 18 months for me, that we've been able to execute on loans with really, really high-caliber developers well known in the industry. It makes it really fun to do business with that type of borrower.
But as far as the cycle goes, I mean, listen, I've been through quite a few now, as you have as well. I think you're never going to know when the bottom's going to drop out or when you're in the beginning or the middle or the end of it. I think there are certain consistencies that are true of every cycle in the market. I think you said it earlier, which is discipline. How do you get discipline?
I think it's in your structure. I think it's how incentives are structured within your own business. One thing we did very early on, which I've continued to this day, is stay invested in all of your deals. Put your own money and the money of your partners in the business in your deals and ride along with your investors.
As much as we all want to say that we all look out for our investors' money, when you have your own money in the deal, number one, it's a huge vote of confidence for the deal in the eyes of your investors, and I think it relieves you from making certain mistakes because you're really incentivized to make sure that the deal is right. The deal is going to pay off.
Bad deals happen. That's a part of life. You do enough of them, it's going to happen. But when the incentives are aligned between yourself and your investors, your capital partners, it avoids mistakes. I've kept that for 10 years. It's served me well.
Aaron Strauss: Keeping it real, keeping it honest, and aligning the incentives and the capital, of course, makes a lot of sense. I know not so much tied to real estate, but you've also done some teaching on real estate finance lately. I know Hofstra brought you back in, and you play professor by night and deal guy by day. I don't know if that's true, something that's been floating out there publicly. I don't want to out you as a nighttime adjunct professor, but it's been pretty cool.
Evan Bell: Yes. It's very cool. It was a great honor to do that. I'm laughing just because I still can't—if the student Evan Bell had been told that I would be a professor, even an adjunct professor, I would have laughed back then. I'm still laughing now. But it's tremendously rewarding. I was just honored to be asked to do it.
Aaron Strauss: Maybe talk to us for a second about how you have to talk to these young people coming out of school. You're never going to give them so much real-life experience. But when you sit down for that mentoring session with people getting into the space, getting into the business fundamentals, I'm not talking about LTV and things like that, but I'm just talking about business basics, operating principles, if you will.
Obviously, you have things like integrity, do the right thing, have a good reputation. But X's and O's, what are those soft skills you think are really critical for success in the business community at large, real estate specifically? What have been your operating principles you try to give over to people when they get in your orbit?
Evan Bell: For me, it's been about relationships. Until the AI robots come in and take us all over, I think that's going to remain. Real estate, I think there was a time in the pre-COVID, maybe post-COVID days, where there was this move towards more of a commoditized type business, certainly in the finance space. But at the end of the day, I think it's all about relationships. Most people would tell you that.
So as a young person, and it's uncomfortable, because you're dealing with people that are older than you and more experienced, and interacting with them can be scary, and everyone's busy, but make yourself available. Reach out to people, ask questions. People notice that. I notice that. Listen.
Also, among your age cohort and people that are at the same level as you or close to the same level as you, you treat everyone with respect because it's the right thing to do, but it's also the smart thing to do because you have no idea when you're in your 20s or even into your early 30s, where people are going to go in their careers. Someone you think is down here today can be up here tomorrow, and vice versa.
Relationships, good relationships across the board, and never burning bridges always can help in your career, whatever your career is. Those social skills, we're not born with it completely. You can develop them. You can practice them. A lot of it is just by going out there and talking to people. Maybe you ask a stupid question, and you say something that maybe didn't come out exactly, articulated as you wanted it to be, but you know what? You got to show up.
I think Woody Allen said that 99% of success is showing up. A lot of people don't show up. Show up and be ready to say yes and try things that maybe you're going to fail at. That's how it worked out for me. I didn't have a roadmap. I know you didn't.
Saying yes to certain opportunities that scare you a little bit, maybe you don't know if you can do them. That's how I got into the lending business. I had no idea if I could do it. I thought I could, but until you try, you don't know. So create those relationships and keep yourself open to opportunities.
Aaron Strauss: Well said. I think I'm seeing this, you're seeing this. Look at your core partners, you've known them for a long time. I'm working with people that maybe I met 15 years ago, never really had a working relationship. All of a sudden, somebody calls you out of the blue, but it's really not out of the blue. It's because you hopefully did right by them many years ago, or your reputation was justified with all the right dynamics, having become the person that's worthy of doing the work, frankly. So you certainly put in that relationship capital over the years by doing the right thing.
I want to ask you another question too. You're doing a lot of these mid to larger loans. Unity, I think, was properly categorized from some smaller to mid-balance-sized loans, which is a great natural evolution. It's obviously the same amount of work going into a small deal than a bigger deal.
Evan Bell: Sometimes more.
Aaron Strauss: Sometimes, yes. Sometimes more in the smaller deals. That's in my experience. I'm sure the same thing with yours. But the quality of the borrowers now has elevated. It's more nationally known type of borrower. So maybe you can talk about some of the deals you're doing. Don't name any parties, obviously. But how you're structuring things, obviously, construction loans, not everyone's making them, what are you thinking through commonly when you're looking at these opportunities? Maybe describe generically one or two you've recently done.
Evan Bell: Sure. Some of these are in the public domain, so I'm happy to disclose what's already out there anyway. Right now, a lot of the buying and selling is muted compared to what it used to be. I know that'll change at some point, but there's just not as much buying and selling as there was pre-inflation, which is keeping a lot of bridge deals on ice until those deals free up. Either they're sold or there's some recap that makes sense.
Most of the deals that are making sense right now are on the construction side or a bridge to construction. So that's what we've been focusing on while keeping our minds open to bridge as they come about. Some of the more recent deals we've done—we're about to close one in the next day or two in Brooklyn on a, it's about $51 million construction loan for a commercial property in Williamsburg, which we think is a great project. Mostly retail, some parking, significantly pre-leased, good sponsor. So that's one deal we're working on right now.
We've had the opportunity to close with Kushner Companies on a few deals. iStar on one deal in Asbury Park, which is a market we've done a couple of deals in. Another one with Somerset Development. All real high-quality builders know what they're doing, have done this many times. We look for obviously a sponsor that we're comfortable can execute, which is the case in all those deals, a business plan that makes sense.
Also, we want to be able to add value. Can we get the borrower enough term to get them from beginning to end, even if they may need an extension? We want to underwrite to an exit. That's really been our guiding light, creating safety for our investors as well as a reasonable risk-adjusted return. We've done that in different points of the capital stack. We've done senior mortgage construction loans. We've done mezz construction loans as well, which is another structure that we're comfortable with.
For us, it's about inserting ourselves into a place in the capital stack that creates value for our investors, but also for our borrowers to execute on their business plan, whether it's a bridge or construction loan.
Aaron Strauss: Yep, I totally understand. Also, you've done a good job with relationships you have in place going back a long time, at times teaming up with other parties to take potentially pieces of their deals, vice versa, things like that, which is always really helpful to have those relationships in the market to see more market flow. How about the firm itself?
I mean, Lorimer's obviously new. The relationships go back a long time. The capital is the capital. Your team is emerging. Any growth you'd like to see in the next year or two, if you can chart your course? I'd like to try to close this many deals, or is it much more about the qualitative aspect? Of course, the deals have to underwrite, but do you have a target you'd like to get to? Like, "I'd like to have this amount of deals closed this year," or so on.
Evan Bell: I try not to have a specific number. I try to make each year better than the one prior so that there's that forward momentum. We're new-ish at this point, though very active over the last year or so. We're building out our team, and we're trying to do it in a methodical way and bring on good people that can help us do it the right way.
Our first hire, I think this reflects a little bit about the way I think, was not on the origination side. It was actually on the servicing side to make sure that all our existing book and our existing investors have transparency and corporate oversight.
If I miss out on a deal, I can sleep at night. If we have a problem with one of our existing deals, that's going to keep me up at night. So I want to make sure that all of our existing loans are well-tended, and they are. Our next few hires are probably going to focus on the origination and underwriting side. We're having those conversations currently.
Actually, we're not in a rush to build out a massive team. We want to make sure we get the right quality people rather than quantity because the people I hire, I want them to be here a long time. I hate turnover if I can avoid it. Finding good people's hard. So that's been a core focus.
I think you said qualitative is really the most important for us. We can only close what the market is giving, and of course, we have to compete on every deal with a lot of other great bridge lenders in the space. So for me, it's about small incremental growth every year. If we have one year that we hit it out of the park and can keep that up, that's great. But for me, it's about continuing to build relationships, do good deals, and the rest should work itself out.
Aaron Strauss: I agree. You can't control market forces. You can just control what you put into it. You put in a lot of great work every day. One of the things I like to touch on the podcast, a little bit more of an awkward question because it doesn't tie to markets or real estate or anything else. It's really, we call it The Dealmakers' Edge. So I'm trying to focus more on that mental health aspect within the dealmaking community. It's just like a passion project, if you will.
Evan Bell: Sure.
Aaron Strauss: This is a very stressful industry. Every industry is stressful. You're at the peak of stress because you're signing up large deals. Every deal is complex. There are legal aspects. There's the underwriting of the business. There's the property itself. There's underwriting the borrower. There are timeframes, which are oftentimes extraordinarily unrealistic, we can say, especially in the bridge world. So you have to make a lot happen all the time.
You're under the gun. You execute. You make it happen. But you're under a lot of pressure. You have to juggle so many things. Your investors have to be kept happy. Your borrowers have to have certainty of closing. Manage your vendors. On those days, and I've sat with you on some of those days.
Evan Bell:Y es, you have.
Aaron Strauss: When it's rocky, everyone goes through. You have good days, bad days, everything in between. What message are you telling yourself? Because I think that's a big thing to hear. Everyone hears about the successes, but the fact is a lot of this business is just sort of powering through, keep moving forward. So what type of message do you tell yourself when you're going through a very stressful period, given that a lot of the people listening to this podcast are literally juggling their own complexities, usually in the context of dealmaking?
Evan Bell: I mean, I think a lot of it is trying to keep a perspective. I read a lot, and as I've gotten older, I used to be more into war history and reading about great battles and leaders. I still do that and I love it. I think it actually gives great lessons for the business world, reading about great lives and great people, and how they overcame adversity. But I've been reading more philosophy lately, which is opening my mind to the larger forces at work in the world and in the universe.
The one thing that would bother me is if I wasn't giving it my all, but ultimately, and I'll revert to a book I love, which is Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, where he says you can't control what happens to you. You can control your response to it. That boils down to most things in life, meaning there's a lot of chance. There are a lot of happy accidents and bad accidents, and everyone's going to go through that. It's not just you.
In business, most of these things, thankfully, are little things. In life, there are some really big things. We both have families and people that love us and care about us, and friends and supporters. In business, as long as you come to work every day and you do the right thing and you're honest and transparent with the people that you work with on both sides, whether your borrowers, your partners, it doesn't matter. Things tend to work themselves out, but it's how you react to those down times.
I think a lot of it is just understanding that these are part of life and there's bigger work at play here than what's going on in the office. If you're just all business all the time, it's too much of a burden to bear. It's that outside life. That's why we do it. I love what I do. But ultimately, we do it to provide value for our customers and for our partners and provide a livelihood for our families. Enjoying it is like the icing on the cake.
The fact that we love what we do makes our life that much better. So, if you have to roll with the tough times, that's the way it is. Don't take it personal because it ain't just you. Everyone's got their bag of problems no matter how great they look when you see them out at lunch or at some mixer or some real estate event. Everyone's got stuff going on, good and bad. You just got to try and keep a smile on your face and just continue to show up every day and do the right thing.
Aaron Strauss: Very well said. It's funny you mentioned that outside life. I was talking to a lawyer this morning, and she actually has like a comic strip on her wall or like a little picture of somebody having a meeting in a big firm setting, in a huge law firm setting. The senior partners are telling the associate, "It has come to our attention that you have a life outside of the firm," which I thought was classic.
Evan Bell: How dare you?
Aaron Strauss: God forbid you engage on planet Earth. I agree with you that that book by Viktor Frankl, which I've read, is just fundamental, really, for anybody walking the Earth to appreciate. If you haven't read it, you just must read it to be walking the Earth. So I fully agree with all of that. I know we all ride our ups and downs, and it's great to admit to some vulnerability. I think it just makes conversations flow so much easier and better, and shows the human side.
You're right. As hard as we work, we do need to carve out some of that time. I'm very guilty of that myself, that you want to do it all. You want to accomplish it all. You need to sometimes step back and say, "What's really important? What can I actually achieve? What's realistic to achieve?" Find the balance, or you're just going to burn out, frankly. So that's a great answer, and I appreciate that.
Anything else we didn't talk about that you think we should have talked about in this conversation that perhaps you want someone to hear about, whether it's on the recruiting side, you're growing a team, whether it's in the borrower community or brokerage community, it probably sends you a lot of deal flow, capital investors, what message you think we could have hit on that we didn't otherwise?
Evan Bell: I mean, I think we hit on most things. I think that the main thing that I'm out there every day speaking with people is I've become somewhat known in the business to a lot of people through relationships and whatnot. The rebranding has given us the opportunity and my new partnerships with my Lorimer partners, it's just given us the opportunity to do a broader mix of deal types, deal structures, and deal sizes that I wasn't able to do before.
A lot of what I've been doing is just getting the word out through the deals that we've closed and getting in the Commercial Observer or whatnot. Sitting down with people for lunch or meetings to just remind people that we're out here, we're executing. Obviously, we always have to win the deal. There's a lot of great private lenders out there. But we lose 100% of the deals we don't see. So for us, it's just about staying in the mix and staying in front of the other dealmakers in this business that are looking for homes for capital.
Aaron Strauss: Well said. Well, you've certainly made a great name for yourself. It's a name that people are knowing more and more. Even though the brand is new, the story is constantly emerging. I've been honored to have a front row seat to a bunch of it and watch your development.
Evan Bell: You've been an instrumental part. What can I tell you? You've been a very instrumental part.
Aaron Strauss: Appreciate the plug. But no, all kidding aside, appreciate our friendship. I really love to hang out with you in person and appreciate the conversation. I think people listening to this will get the full picture and really get a good framework. With that, we'll wrap, and to be continued. Can't wait to watch your continued success. Keep it up.
Evan Bell: I really appreciate it. Thanks so much, Aaron. Always great to be with you.
Aaron Strauss: Of course. Thank you for joining The Dealmakers' Edge. Don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Please give us a five-star rating so more people can follow the conversation.
The Dealmakers' Edge with A.Y. Strauss highlights the stories, successes, and struggles behind major commercial real estate investors. Each episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at commercial real estate leaders and their unique edge.
Hosted by Aaron Y. Strauss, Managing Partner at A.Y. Strauss
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