Sound Point hires Cerberus MD to lead CRE capital formation

Sound Point Capital Management, a $44bn New York manager with businesses across special situations, distressed debt, structured credit, direct lending and CRE, has hired Faris AbiNader from Cerberus Capital Management as head of real estate capital formation, Alternative Credit Investor first reported. AbiNader's brief is institutional capital formation for the firm's commercial real estate credit business, a unit Sound Point says has gained significant momentum through additional institutional mandates, including on behalf of strategic insurance partners. He was a managing director at Cerberus, where he represented the firm's residential investment platform.

Sound Point's CRE platform has originated approximately $4.3bn across 167 first-mortgage loans, senior first-lien mortgages secured by middle-market multifamily and industrial properties in select US markets. At roughly $26m per loan, that granularity gives the platform a pooled-vehicle character: a single loan default moves the book by a small fraction, not a double-digit percentage.

Sound Point's head of CRE credit, Don MacKinnon, said AbiNader's relationships and experience would help broaden the institutional investor base, and AbiNader cited the platform's scale, track record and origination capabilities. Together those comments describe a franchise preparing to raise again, one that sees real estate credit as a repeatable product rather than a series of bespoke loans.

The appointment marks CRE credit as a scaled asset class competing for the same institutional dollar as corporate direct lending. More distribution muscle, though, will be chasing a defined set of senior multifamily and industrial loans, and that could compress the spreads that made the strategy attractive. The book's next test is whether it can keep growing without loosening the underwriting that built it; Sound Point's answer is now a person whose job is to bring in the capital to pay for growth.