Thomas Bogal

Thomas Bogal has broad expertise on a wide variety of transactional matters, including real estate finance, structured finance, joint ventures, commercial leasing, restructurings, and general corporate matters.

Mr. Bogal has extensive experience representing clients in all aspects of secured real estate financings, including both single asset and multiple asset transactions secured by office, hotel, retail, multifamily, industrial and healthcare properties. He has particular expertise in loans destined for securitization and transactions involving multiple layers of subordinate financing. Mr. Bogal previously practiced law in the real estate finance group of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft.

Representative transactions include:

• $2.6 billion mortgage and mezzanine loan used by The Blackstone Group to acquire Extended Stay America, Inc.

• Multiple mortgage loan transactions in the aggregate in excess of $1 billion secured by shopping centers in the Northeast owned and operated by the Pyramid Companies

• $300 million mortgage loan secured by 475 Kindercare child care centers

• A mortgage loan and five mezzanine loans in the aggregate amount of $520 million secured by 555 California Street in San Francisco

• Commercial leases involving office, restaurant and health clinic tenants.

Mr. Bogal was a co-founder of Red Pine Advisors LLC, where he served as general counsel and was responsible for all legal matters of the firm. Red Pine Advisors specializes in providing valuation opinions relating to thinly-traded financial investments, with a focus on real estate and structured credit instruments. Red Pine Advisors sold itself to Houlihan Lokey, a Los Angeles-based investment bank, in 2010. Mr. Bogal served in an in-house capacity at Houlihan Lokey following the sale.

Prior to founding Red Pine, Mr. Bogal was chief operating officer of Taberna Securities, the broker-dealer subsidiary of RAIT Financial Trust (NYSE: RAS), a mortgage REIT active in a variety of real estate and structured credit investment asset classes. Taberna was the leading provider of corporate-level unsecured debt capital to REITs and other real estate companies in the form of trust preferred securities and subordinated notes. There, Mr. Bogal was responsible for all legal and operational matters relating to the structuring and closing of over 70 loans to real estate companies and supervised the execution of seven CDO transactions totaling approximately $5 billion.

Mr. Bogal received his J.D. from St. John’s University, magna cum laude, where he served as Articles and Notes Editor of the St. John’s Law Review.