ANDREW
WILSON
Managing Partner
Andrew has nearly 30 years of experience in the real estate (public and private), banking and finance sectors, with over half of this period operating at board director level. He has a successful track record in real estate asset management, deal origination and structuring, as well as corporate finance and M&A transactions.
Andrew began his career at KPMG (London) and went on to build a successful career in Chelsfield plc, formerly a listed company, working as their Corporate Development Manager. During his time at Chelsfield plc, Andrew was involved in a number of UK and international real estate, as well as equity market capital-raising, transactions.
In 2002, he was brought into Global Switch Sàrl, now an internationally renowned data centre provider, to turn around the group, post the 2000 technology market crash. Andrew joined as CFO and was appointed CEO in 2004. The business required strong leadership and direction in this testing 'rescue' phase, but the group was successfully returned to profitability by 2006.
In 2006, Andrew joined Land Securities Group plc, the UK's largest REIT by market capitalisation, as Business Development Director. Within this broad role, Andrew was instrumental in deal origination, major acquisitions and disposals and capital raising e.g. a c.£500m Accor portfolio acquisition and a c.£800m rights issue.
In 2010 Andrew was hired by Lloyds Banking Group plc to lead the Real Estate Solutions team, within its Global Non-Core Division. As Managing Director, he led the strategy and execution for the bank in this area, property value enhancing strategies and a programme of large loan portfolio sales. This multi-faceted strategy helped enable Lloyds to reduce its non-core real estate exposure.
LEO MCLAUGHLIN
Partner
Leo has 17 years of experience in the banking and finance sector, the majority of which has been focused on real estate finance. He has a successful track record in running large financial transactions including loan portfolio disposal and arrangement of debt finance for acquisition and refinance.
Prior to joining the Global Non-Core Division of Lloyds Banking Group plc, Leo had key roles in the risk function at Bank of Scotland Corporate (part of HBOS plc) and led analytics teams focused on the impact of capital adequacy directives on the Bank’s commercial real estate loan book. Much of this work involved portfolio risk assessment of the Bank’s exposure to the investment, development and house building sectors.
From late 2010 to 2015, Leo advised on and executed transactions resulting in a reduction of nearly £3bn of gross exposure from the Global Non-Core balance sheet of Lloyds. Latterly he managed many of the end-to-end processes and sell-side activity of the group’s UK loan portfolio sale programme.