CMBS vet Paul Vanderslice exits CCRE

The head of one of the commercial mortgage industry’s big bookrunners has left the firm he was brought on to reboot just two years ago.

Paul Vanderslice, who helped pioneer the market for commercial mortgage backed securities, retired last week as the head of Cantor Commercial Real Estate, the lending arm of Wall Street titan Howard Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald, sources told The Real Deal.

Vanderslice could not be immediately reached and a spokesperson for CCRE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Vanderslice, who had spent 30 years at Citigroup and most recently ran its U.S. CMBS group, in 2018 joined CCRE, which Lutnick launched in 2010 to compete with powerhouses like Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo. He took over for CCRE CEO Anthony Orso, who left to run Newmark Knight Frank’s capital markets strategies.

Vanderslice was there to “reboot” CCRE, he told Commercial Observer last year. But one source familiar with the situation said there were internal conflicts with the staff after Orso left.

Earlier this year, Cantor was reportedly looking to lay off hundreds of workers, one of the largest staff reductions on Wall Street.

CCRE last year underwrote $2.9 billion worth of CMBS deals, according to Commercial Mortgage Alert. That placed the firm at number 10 on the publication’s ranking of the top U.S. CMBS bookrunners in terms of volume.

Contact Rich Bockmann at rb@therealdeal.com or 908-415-5229