The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 27 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Martell: The next five years represent the opportunity of our careers
“It's definitely billions of dollars. I believe this is the opportunity of our careers.”
Martell: Distressed borrowers often exploit relationship leniency from banks
“I think borrowers many times will abuse that relationship with their banks.”
Martell: Maverick pays no bonuses, offering above-market salaries and carry
“A lot of firms in the real estate space have more of an eat what you kill structure, but we've decided we don't want to pay bonuses to employees at all. Instead, we pay them a high base salary, and their comp exceeds market comp, and they have the ability to i…”
Martell: Deadlock in 50-50 partnerships is a tremendous benefit
“Many people worry about 50, 50 partnerships when you have a deadlock. Well, if you have deadlock, you can't proceed. And so you need to figure out a way to solve that problem. And so in the early days, we would talk about it very calmly. You have to check your…”
Martell: Maverick is NYC's top non-performing real estate loan buyer
“Maverick has become the number one buyer of non-performing loans secured by real estate in New York City.”
Martell: Middle-market NPLs lack systematic capital competition due to complexity
“That middle market space, there's a tremendous amount of opportunity for us to play in it because it's complicated, because the material is complex, and because there's not a lot of other capital pursuing those opportunities, not in a systematic way the way we…”
Martell: Simultaneously negotiating and enforcing legal remedies resolves distressed loans fastest
“Deploying both of these things at the same time is the most successful means towards facilitating a fast resolution. In other words, you're talking to them, but you're also enforcing your legal remedies.”
Martell: Friction costs make loan settlements superior to taking property ownership
“If we end up owning the properties, there's really significant friction cost on the transaction due to transfer taxes at broker fees and carrying costs. And so we've found historically that you're better off settling with the borrower before it comes to that.”
Martell: Easing up on foreclosure litigation signals weakness to borrowers
“When we think about the stick and litigation, we don't stop. We don't let up. It would be perceived as a weakness. And it's important for us to push from that side hard.”
Martell: Maverick uses custom LLMs to extract loan terms beyond human scale
“We are able to build a large language model that actually ingests the loan documents and pulls terms From those loan documents, inputs them into a spreadsheet. It's able to do that at a rate that is superior to what a human can do, and at a scale that no human…”
Martell: Maverick's $7M average deal size deters larger institutional competitors
“So our average transaction size is seven million dollars. That keeps a lot of the larger players out of our space. It's too complicated and too much work for them to get involved.”
Martell: Maverick holds zero debt secured by NYC office properties
“We actually own no debt secured by office in New York City.”
Martell: Real estate lending activity has plummeted over 50% post-rate hikes
“If you graph out lending activity over the past 20 years, we've experienced an extremely precipitous drop since the start of the rate hikes, and we're over 50% below where we were before rates started getting hiked, and so the market's really frozen.”
Martell: Maverick's first NPL deal returned a 1.3x multiple in three months
“That first transaction paid off in the first three months. We made about a 1.3 multiple.”
Martell: Maverick bought a Lower East Side mechanics lien at 50% discount
“On the second transaction that we did, we bought a loan secured by a hotel under construction on the lower east side of Manhattan. There was a mechanics lien sandwiched in the middle of the capital stack. We ended up negotiating with the construction company t…”
Martell: Non-performing loan purchases require rapid capital and close in five days
“Buying non-performing loans requires you to have capital and the ability to move quickly. These transactions can close in as quickly as five days, but lenders want certainty of closure, and they want to know that you're going to do what you say you're going to…”
Martell: Maverick is investing a $317M sixth fund that is 80% institutional
“We're presently investing out of our Sixth private equity style fund, which has about three hundred seventeen million dollars in commitments, and 80% of that capital is institutional, limited partners, foundations, endowments, and pensions.”
Martell: Maverick profits from loan discounts, default interest, and fees
“We make money by buying those loans at a discount to the underlying collateral value, and then encouraging repayment from the borrowers. The profit is made up of any discount to the principal balance that we are able to negotiate with the lenders, as well as t…”
Martell: Maverick has executed 185 non-performing loan transactions
“Naturally, after doing 185 of these transactions, we've also built some relationships.”
Martell: Maverick's LP return mandate is high teens net
“So our mandate is to deliver high teens net returns to our LPs.”
Martell: Maverick is reviewing record pipeline volume but closing few deals
“What we've been experiencing in the market for the past 12 months, and really even further than that, going back to the beginning of interest rate hikes, is a bid-ass gap in the market, and so we've never been busy or underwriting or looking at opportunities, …”
Martell: Maverick takes back keys on 10% of NPL investments
“We are willing to take back the keys, and we've done so about 10% of the time that we've made investments in non-performing loans, and so we've taken back the keys about 20 buildings.”
Martell: Maverick has spent millions over a decade building proprietary data warehouse
“We've been building Maverick's data warehouse for over 10 years now. We've spent millions of dollars on it.”
Martell: Over $600B in active real estate debt exists in NYC
“There's over a million properties in New York City, over a thousand lenders, currently over six hundred billion of active debt secured by real estate in New York City.”
Martell: Multifamily consistently comprises ~60% of Maverick's portfolio
“The vast majority is multifamily. It's about 60%, and that's pretty constant over the years since we've been doing the business”