Last November, ORIX Corporation USA acquired Hunt Real Estate Capital, a family-owned commercial real estate investment management firm. The marriage paired Hunt with ORIX Real Estate Capital brands, Lancaster Pollard and Red Capital Group.
A year later, ORIX, a global financial services firm and subsidiary of Japan-based ORIX Corporation, is tightening the bonds between its three brands by merging them and ORIX’s real estate lending arm under the same umbrella in an entity called Lument.
Lument CEO Jim Flynn tells GlobeSt.com the single brand will “eliminate any confusion or questions about who we are.”
“We’re basically taking all of our lending and debt business and putting it under one brand to turn the page in a positive way and really communicate effectively to our clients and investors in the market,” Flynn says.
The word Lument was attractive because of its association with light and energy. The company spent much of the year working with its marketing and consulting teams, employees and constituents, including clients, investors and business partners, to hone the new brand.
Now that Hunt, Lancaster Pollard and Red Capital Group have combined to form Lument, the entity has an impressive footprint. It is the top Federal Housing Administration (FHA) multifamily, affordable and seniors lender. Also, it is a top three seniors housing lender overall and a top 10 non-bank multifamily lender. Its combined servicing portfolio is now more than $46 billion.
“We think it [the merger] will better enable us to find new ways to serve our customers,” Flynn says. “It will make us more visible to our customers.”
Additionally, Flynn says, the combined companies will allow Lument to “use the power of our brand and the power of our platform and the size of our platform to help those clients achieve their goals.”
Lument provides capital for a wide array of products, including conventional multifamily housing, affordable housing, seniors lending, small loan landing, manufactured housing and non-agency commercial real estate lending. That service includes multifamily but is just outside of the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and FHA spaces.
With those many offerings, the merger process wasn’t easy. “In some cases, we had to take groups of people from three different organizations who all worked in a specific area and [we] worked to form a single team with a single leader,” Flynn says.
In the process, Lument found some efficiencies, like bringing its servicing capacity in house and combining it in one unit. But it also saw some complementary functions. “We operated in many of the same spaces, but we didn’t have a tremendous amount of client overlap, which allowed us to put these teams together by adding them together and creating that one plus one is three environment,” Flynn says.