CapitalThinking targets the commercial mortgage market

Real Estate Weekly, March 15, 2000

CapitalThinking, Inc. recently announced the launch of its new website, www.capital-thinking.com, designed to deliver Internet efficiencies to the $250 billion (annual U.S.) world of commercial real estate mortgages. By combining proprietary Internet technology with experienced real estate professionals, CapitalThinking's solution will bring unmatched speed and efficiency to the process of obtaining commercial real estate loans.

The first e-business site designed specifically to manage the extremely labor-intensive, document-burdened commercial finance industry, CapitalThinking will serve lenders, mortgage brokers and borrowers alike. CapitalThinking is launching with thirty employees and over $70 million of loan requests in the pipeline, deals which were originated in February to help ensure the site is completely prepared for live deals at launch.

CapitalThinking is the brainchild of Internet visionary Charles Ferguson and real estate finance veteran Heather Shively. The site was developed by a 12-deep tech team led by Dan Woods, who most recently created the technology for TheStreet.com.

"CapitalThinking's sole mission is to help lenders, brokers and borrowers close commercial mortgages with greater speed and efficiency," explained Shively, co-founder and CEO. "Ours is the first commercial mortgage business to apply both online and traditional methodology to complete loam transactions."

For brokers and borrowers, this technology will streamline and speed the documentation process, increasing production for brokers and lowering costs for borrowers. For lenders, CapitalThinking delivers quality preliminary underwriting on transactions tailored to their specific requirements. The company's proprietary, user-friendly document management technology insures a great amount of control over the process for all categories of users.

"It's easy to underestimate the technological challenges associated with originating and closing online commercial mortgages," says John Petrovski, group president of Heller Financial's real estate lending group and one of the lenders on the CapitalThinking website. "It's important to us that CapitalThinking has developed its technology in-house so they can adapt more quickly and appropriately to our needs and the needs of the industry," Petrovski says.

CapitalThinking launches with many of the nation's leading lenders, including a geographically diverse roster of banks, insurance companies, conduits and pension funds. A partial list of early lenders on board includes JP Morgan, CIBC, GMAC, ARCS Commercial Mortgage, and Capital Lease Funding, in addition to Heller. According to Shively, CapitalThinking will provide access to 50-70 lenders in total. "Mass e-mailing a borrower-produced loan application to 500 lenders doesn't work," Shively says.

"Borrowers won't get the best rates when a lender thinks their chances of acquiring and closing a loan are practically zero. Lenders need to spend a little time reviewing a deal to offer the best quote. We give them the incentive to do that, while offering our prospective borrowers and brokers the complete spectrum of lending types from the highest-quality capital sources in the country. It's a win-win for all parties, Shively says.

The company's technology was created and developed internally by a team of more than a dozen full-time, on-site professionals under the direction of Chief Technology Officer Woods. The result is the most robust, scalable and reactive website in the industry.

"Our site can handle thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of deals at the same time, offering lenders their own secure channels for communication. At the same time, both brokers and borrowers are introduced to a nationwide base of well-known capital sources that have an appetite for their product," Woods said. "We are technology enabled - not technology obsessed," he added. "We view our technology as a strategic means to improve the speed and efficiency of the process. But it's our real estate professionals who structure and close the deals."

CapitalThinking's executive team consists of nearly a dozen experienced commercial real estate finance veterans. CEO Shively has been involved in the origination, structuring, syndication and closing of over a billion dollars in real estate financings, across all the major commercial asset classes. Most recently, she served as a director of Bank of Montreal's Real Estate Capital Markets Group. CapitalThinking's managing director of Real Estate Capital Markets, Drew Anderman, was previously the director of Mortgage Originations at Deutsche Bank Mortgage Capital, a division of Deutsche Bank. These two leaders are supported by a full team of commercial lending professionals who join them in personally managing lender relationships and directing each loan through to close for brokers and borrowers.

"We know that commercial real estate lending is not a cookie-cutterprocess, which is why we merge a strong human service element with our website," Anderman said. "Our experienced real estate team understands the complexities and particular nuances of each deal. With CapitalThinking, we leverage our knowledge and abilities with web-based technology to bring unparalleled speed and efficiency to the process of closing loans."