Breneman Blueprint: Real Estate and Entrepreneurship Podcast · Drew Breneman

Steve Kundert, CBRE -Debt Expert, $12+ Billion Financed

·1 hr 29 min·5 clips

Debt funds charged one and a half points in, half a point out, with exit fees increasingly waived.

1. Breneman Blueprint: Real Estate and Entrepreneurship Podcast centers this episode on Steve Kundert and multifamily debt financing. 2. Drew Brenneman introduces Steve Kundert as a senior vice president with CBRE’s debt and structured finance group and says he has done more than 25 loans with him. 3. The episode asks how borrowers should choose among banks, debt funds, agencies, and other capital sources for multifamily deals. 4. Steve says he has been a mortgage broker for his entire career and marks his 20th year in the industry. 5. He traces his path from Cone Financial in Chicago to Grubb & Ellis in 2009 and then to CBRE after Grubb filed bankruptcy in 2012. 6. Steve frames the market around multifamily and splits it into institutional and private assets based on size. 7. For Chicago, he describes private or sub-institutional properties as typically under 40 units, often five to 25 units, including five-flats and smaller courtyard buildings. 8. He says those smaller deals generally borrow between $1 million and $7.5 million, which matches the agency small-balance ceiling. 9. Traditional banks still dominate that private range, and he describes them as relationship-driven and usually recourse. 10. He contrasts recourse bank loans with non-recourse structures, where liability stays with the borrowing entity except for fraud or misappropriation. 11. Steve says debt funds became more prominent over the last five to ten years as non-bank capital for transitional deals. 12. He defines debt funds as private equity firms that raise capital to invest in real estate loans, usually on a short-term floating-rate basis. 13. He says smaller debt-fund loans cost more because the funds need both a percentage return and a meaningful dollar return. 14. On larger debt-fund loans, he cites roughly one and a half points in, half a point out, and spreads that often run from 150 to 350 basis points. 15. He says exit fees are being negotiated down in the current market, with some bridge-to-agency funds waiving them entirely when a loan transitions into a permanent CBRE product. 16. Steve explains that debt funds often underwrite to a seven debt-yield exit based on year-three performance rather than today’s cash flow. 17. He gives an example of an 86% loan-to-cost single-point-of-contact structure on a suburban Chicago multifamily deal that bundled renovation dollars into one mortgage payment. 18. He says bank loans usually include debt-service covenants, and he explains how borrowers negotiate remedy time and income-based escrows instead of loan downsizing. 19. The conversation stays technical but practical, with Drew asking lender-side questions and Steve answering in a straightforward, program-by-program format. 20. Real estate borrowers comparing multifamily debt structures and renovation financing would get the most from this episode. 21. Viewers seeking a high-level motivational overview of real estate financing would probably skip it.

As heard by us

A blunt, useful map of how real estate debt gets sized and who it fits.

This episode keeps its footing by sticking to one plain lesson: know the deal cold before walking into a lender conversation. It works best when it gets practical about equity, debt, and intermediaries, and when it lays out why the debt side can change the shape of a deal so…

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Why you'd press play

You want the lender-side logic behind a deal, without the usual smoke.

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