Callahan hires deal talent as office waits on printed marks

Callahan Capital Partners has hired Mari Lehman as vice president, investments, IREI reports. Her remit covers the acquisition transaction process and the asset-management side of a portfolio that currently includes 110 North Wacker in Chicago and 101 Mission in San Francisco.

The résumé carries more information than the title. At Sterling Bay she managed investments, led development efforts and executed joint venture transactions, financings and dispositions across a $7 billion, 11 million-square-foot portfolio of office and mixed-use assets; before that she was at Zeller Realty Group. That scope runs the length of the office cycle — build or buy, capitalize, then sell — and Callahan has bought it while its disclosed holdings run to two buildings.

The hire is a capital-markets play, not a personnel item. Office has found a clearing mechanism only where a trade prints; undisclosed conversions and vacancy-adjusted comps are still the market's price discovery. Staffing the acquisition process is a bet that the set of printed trades widens, because an acquisitions seat in a market where nothing clears is a seat with very little to underwrite.

Earlier this month, Draper & Kramer's $93.5 million refinance on the Elizabeth reset a coupon on a 2024-vintage tower, and the construction-lending quote inside the announcement was the part that mattered; in that deal the loan, not the appraisal, did the talking. Hiring equity-side deal talent is the same read one step earlier: discovery begins when someone signs.

The disposition and financing lines in Lehman's record matter as much as the acquisition mandate, and probably more at a firm whose disclosed book is small enough that every hold decision doubles as a portfolio decision. Acquisitions experience gets a firm into a market, while JV financing and dispositions are what it needs once an asset has finished compounding. The exit half of the cycle is likely to arrive first at a two-building book, though IREI's coverage does not address timing on either end.

Callahan is underwriting liquidity the comp sheets cannot yet show. Two office towers in Chicago and San Francisco are worth what a buyer pays for them, and in this market that buyer has to sign before anyone else can mark the asset. Watch whether either building reaches a contract before the next acquisition does.