After fleeing Nightingale, exec joins firm’s former partner

Nightingale’s former head of acquisitions has landed a job at Intervest Capital Partners, which for years was the troubled firm’s partner.

Will Hutton left Nightingale in July as the firm and its founder, Elie Schwartz, became engulfed in a scandal for misappropriating investor money in two Nightingale office deals. Nightingale has since lost many of its key assets to lenders and partners.

Hutton’s move sheds light on Nightingale’s close relationship with Intervest, formerly known as Wafra Capital Providers. The New York-based firm spun off from Kuwait’s sovereign wealth fund in 2012 and specializes in Sharia-compliant real estate financing and leasing.

Over the past decade, it partnered with Nightingale on most of the latter’s deals, including office buildings at 300 Lafayette Street in Soho and 111 Wall Street. It also was involved in Nightingale’s purchase of the Coca-Cola building at 711 Fifth Avenue, which they flipped to Michael Shvo and partners a month later.

Hutton joined Intervest in October, according to Revere, a platform for real estate dealmakers. His job responsibilities are acquisitions & dispositions, equity strategies, and investment management.

Reached by phone, Hutton declined to comment.

Hutton, a native of Wichita, Kansas, graduated from Cornell in 2015. He moved to New York City and started his career buying distressed notes and REOs at Cohen Equities. In 2016, Hutton joined Nightingale as an analyst before rising through the ranks to become director of acquisitions and capital markets.

Prior to working at Nightingale, Hutton said, he knew Schwartz through friends.

“He was a younger guy and he was not looking to hire a team,” he said on a podcast in 2021. “I convinced him that I had the tools to help him grow his business.”

During Hutton’s tenure, Nightingale went on an acquisition spree. It bought 1500 Market in Downtown Philadelphia for $328 million in 2017. It purchased the Whale Building in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park for $84 million in 2020.

That same pandemic year, it acquired the leasehold interest in the 27-story 111 Wall Street in Manhattan for $175 million. In 2021, it bought the building’s fee interest for $220 million. The property was the first in New York to land a C-PACE loan, a type of financing designed for energy efficiency improvements.

Nightingale’s bet on office proved disastrous as remote work took hold. In the summer of 2023, an independent trustee for hundreds of investors who funded deals in Miami Beach and Atlanta through a platform called CrowdStreet said that Schwartz misappropriated their money.

The trustee said he put $12 million into First Republic stock and options just prior to the bank’s seizure by regulators, and also bought watches and made credit card payments. Schwartz finalized a settlement with the trustee in December, but Schwartz missed his first payment.

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