Hermes appoints new head of real estate debt

Hermes Investment Management has appointed Vincent Nobel as its new head of real estate debt.

He replaces Marcus Palmer, who joined the company in the summer of 2013 before leaving a year later to join Royal Bank of Canada as managing director and head of committed lending.

The move underlines Hermes’ continued ambition to be involved in senior lending in the UK, despite it becoming increasingly difficult to achieve strong returns over the past year due to heightened competition.

Nobel joins Hermes from M&G Investments, where he was a senior member of their senior real estate debt team for three years. Before then, he worked in the specialist debt team at Barclays.

Chris Taylor, chief executive of Hermes Real Estate, said: “Real estate debt is an important business growth area for Hermes Real Estate and presents attractive long-term opportunities for investors. 

“Vincent’s market-leading experience and expertise in real estate debt will help us grow our business in this area and maintain the momentum since we launched the Hermes Real Estate Senior Debt Fund. I remain confident that we will secure a diversified portfolio of high-quality loans over the next 12 to 18 months, as we look to this space for the long term.” 

Nobel added: “The senior debt fund is in a good position to select strong transaction opportunities with good return characteristics. The risk-adjusted returns available on senior debt remain attractive to a range of investors, and there are a number of exciting areas to develop in the debt space over the medium term.”

The Hermes Real Estate Senior Debt Fund was launched last year with £400 million of cornerstone, in-house capital. At its outset, the fund was aiming to achieve margins of 250-350 bps on senior lending at loan-to-values of 60-65 percent. It is looking to issue loans of between £30 million and £100 million.