Commercial real estate loan servicing and management business Mount Street has taken over Morgan Stanley’s European real estate debt servicing arm.
The acquisition of Morgan Stanley Mortgage Servicing (MSMS) will increase the size of Mount Street’s commercial loan book to around £8 billion and more than double its headcount in the UK and Germany.
Founded in 1998, MSMS was created as part of the build-out of Morgan Stanley’s European CMBS programme and acts as primary, special and master servicer across Morgan Stanley’s market-leading ELOC CMBS programme, as well as selected agency and third-party transactions. The MSMS team is located in London and Frankfurt, and provides servicing on loans in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland.
MSMS services commercial mortgage loans and CMBS, makes collections and monitors the underlying property collateral. The firm has loan servicing mandates amounting to a total of £4.5 billion.
Mount Street, founded in 2013 by CEO Ravi Joseph and Managing Partners Paul Lloyd and Bill Sexton, is an independent provider of loan servicing and related loan management services to the European CRE sector. Based in London and Frankfurt, the firm has in the past nine months won more than £3.5 billion in new business, including servicing of new loans, servicing of impaired loans acquired by secondary loan buyers, and special servicing and workout of legacy loans in older CMBS deals.
In addition, at the end of 2013, Mount Street took over part of the German CRE loan servicing business of Crown, the loan servicing business owned by private equity firm Forum Partners.
Joseph and Lloyd ran the Morgan Stanley’s European securitisation, CRE lending and CRE loan servicing (MSMS) from 1998-2004.
Lloyd said: “European clients of third party loan agency and servicing – lenders, loan buyers, and bond investors – all want to see more energy and talent focussed on this sector. At Mount Street we are wholly focussed on improving service and results to these clients. We are independent and management-owned, which means that we always go the extra mile to deliver results to our clients.”
Sexton added: “This is a fantastic development for Mount Street and follows our recent transaction with Crown in Germany. This accelerates the growth of our loan servicing platform exponentially, and also gives us the additional scale with which to win future business across Europe and continue to deliver unrivalled client service.”
