Former Pacific National Bank Lending Chief Starts Anew
Submitted May 20, 2010, 6:20 PM
Richard Caldwell, previously executive vice president and chief lending officer at San Francisco-based Pacific National Bank, has created a new real estate investment company in partnership with Michael Tevis, a developer and former commercial property broker. Intrinsic Capital LLC is owned equally by the two men.
The new firm, based in Menlo Park, will pursue two real-estate strategies. One is to acquire existing properties where value can be enhanced through improvements and repositioning, Caldwell said. The other is to purchase mortgage notes secured by commercial real estate assets.
The principals plan to primarily pursue suburban properties of lesser quality. The company is making offers now and hopes to clinch a handful of deals in the near future, Caldwell said.
The new company intends to pursue transactions valued from $5 million to $50 million and to pay all cash. It expects to buy properties ranging from 50,000 square feet to 100,000 square feet and is looking at offices, research and development buildings, industrial properties and some retail.
The principals for the new company have brought in some of their own assets, including the proceeds of a Palo Alto office building sold last month.
Pacific National was one of nine banks with nearly $20 billion in combined assets that were seized by federal regulators on Oct. 30. At the time, Pacific National had assets exceeding $2.3 billion, deposits of more than $1.7 billion and 18 branches. U.S. Bank acquired nearly all of the assets and entered into a loss-sharing agreement with the FDIC on about $15 billion of them.
Caldwell said he expects additional capital for Intrinsic’s deals to come from private-equity funds with a commercial real estate focus. He expects to tap established relationships that he and Tevis have.
Intrinsic expects to have at its disposal capital totaling in excess of $200 million, he said.
Intrinsic plans to acquire properties in the San Francisco Bay Area in markets on the Peninsula, in Silicon Valley and along the Interstate 680 and Interstate 880 corridors. It also will consider assets in Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego.
Before joining Pacific National, Caldwell was a principal and senior vice president for nearly a decade at real estate investment bank Buchanan Street Partners where he ran the Northern California office.
At Pacific National, Caldwell established and managed commercial real estate lending focusing on construction and value-add commercial real estate transactions. He was responsible for annual lending volumes ranging from $750 million to $1.5 billion. Other duties included portfolio management.
Tevis has operated Menlo Park-based Intrinsic Ventures as a real estate investment and development company. The company was formed in 1995 and focused on assets in California, Oregon and Washington. Tevis sold nearly a million square feet of commercial property before commercial real estate markets soured in 2008. He was a senior vice president with brokerage Cornish & Carey Commercial before forming Intrinsic Ventures.
