426. CRE Lending Through Cycles: Stressed Sponsors, Industrial Conviction, & Today’s Debt Market with Stefanie Stewart, Voya Investment Management

Stefanie Stewart (0:00)

And, you know, real estate is cyclical, we all know that, but sometimes those cycles run long. Hopefully the good ones run longer than the bad ones.

Haley Kean (0:12)

Welcome to The TreppWire Podcast, the show where commercial real estate needs data and insights. This is a special guest podcast. I'm Haley Kean with Trepp, a data modeling and analytics firm for the CMBS, commercial real estate and CLO markets. I'm with Stephen Bushbaum, head of applied research and analytics. Today, we are joined by Stefanie Stewart, Senior Vice President and Head of Real Estate Investments at Voya Investment Management, where she is responsible for managing all origination efforts. Over the course of her 19 years with Voya, Stefanie has headed an origination team that produces approximately $4 billion of commercial mortgages annually across the nation, spanning Voya's lending platform of fixed and floating rate core debt, construction and bridge value add. Stefanie also spoke at our Trepp Connect Conference in May, sharing insights particularly on industrial assets on our bifurcation and recovery panel. Stefanie, we are so excited to have you back in front of the Trepp audiences. Thank you for joining us today and welcome to the show.

Stefanie Stewart (1:13)

Thank you for having me.

Haley Kean (1:14)

So we always like to start our show asking how people really found their way into this commercial real estate lending industry. So you've been at Voya for nearly two decades now, but maybe you can take us back. How did you get your start in the business world or commercial real estate in the first place?

Stefanie Stewart (1:32)

So it started for me in college. So I went to Florida State. I went to school out of state and my parents said, that's fine, but you have to get a full-time job. And so I went to work full-time for a student housing group, privately owned, kind of single family, duplexes, a couple of small apartment complexes. But that was my first entry into really seeing that real estate can make money, right? And numbers mean more than just the numbers on the paper. And so I found that pretty interesting. I was a finance major at the time and picked up a double major in real estate. So a little shout out to FSU's real estate program. They have a phenomenal real estate school there. But I had an on-campus interview and it was ING, Voya was ING at the time. And that was 20 years ago. And I thought, you know what? It's, you know, great job. Exposure to all product types all across the country. You know, I'll spend a few years here, figure it out. It was 22, wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. And 20 years later, I'm still here. So I've been an analyst, I've been an originator, I've read regions and now kind of, you know, head of the originations platform. So good people here, really dynamic investment platform. And we've got an evolving program that's been really fun to be a part of and to watch it change over the years and change with the market.

Haley Kean (2:38)

I love it. That's great background. And I'd really love to dig into those 20 years at Voya. You know, you've now invested through the GFC and extended low rate environment, COVID and the recent rate cycle. So maybe you could walk us through which period taught you most as a lender and as someone in this industry.

Stefanie Stewart (2:58)

So I get this question a lot as we hire some of the younger analysts that are entering the workforce. I think I'm very fortunate to have experienced the financial crisis very early in my career. And so I remember, you know, everything was blown and going for a couple of years before we saw the halt there. And it was scary times. I mean, liquidity dried up very quickly. You learned then that things can go wrong and how important the structure is, how important it is to get that right on the front end. But then you got to hear about how things are working out on the back end. So for someone in a production role to start off earlier in your career, seeing the impact on the front end and the structure, but also getting to work through those problems on the back end, I think was invaluable. And, you know, real estate cyclical, we all know that, but sometimes those cycles run long. Hopefully the good ones run longer than the bad ones. But I remember in the rate hike that we had in 2022, I remember looking out at the analyst team here and we'd had 10 years of a pretty good run. And I looked out at the team and I had an analyst team that had never seen a cap rate increase. They'd never seen a value decrease. So I think just seeing that cycle early in my career, it shapes the way that I structure loans going forward. I think about problems that could arise and how we're going to solve those together.