Kat: Tell me a little bit about your background and the experience of the Sortis team.

Paul: I came up as a real estate developer and have built almost every product type (land development, residential construction, multi-family, office, hotel, retail/mixed use.) I’m currently wrapping up the redevelopment and retail leasing of the downtown Seattle Macy’s building. That was a $500 million project with Starwood Capital and we put Amazon into that space. We have project management teams that can handle that size and complexity, so the smaller stuff we may take on with our Funds is easier to mange internally. It also allows us to handle any sort of distressed real estate in any state to monetize the opportunity for our investors. During the last recession Michael Sander and I ran a firm that specialized in distress assets and helped move over a $1 billion in loans and real estate from bank balance sheets to private buyers.

During that process we met Jef Baker, who was running a bank that we ultimately invested in. We sold that bank in 2017 and migrated our bank holding company into Sortis Holdings and continued with lending and investment, only in the private sector. I serve as the executive chairman of the Board of Sortis, while Jef Baker serves as the President and CEO of the holding company. Mike Ferguson, a 20 year Bank veteran joined us as President of our lending subsidiary and oversees much of our Fund’s loan portfolio. We have several other key management members with many years experience in distress, asset management, and investment banking. We were built for this current environment.
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