Alternatives Watch: ORIX USA Taps Seasoned Leadership for RE Credit

ORIX USA appointed Dean Dulchinos to the new role of managing director and head of Real Estate Credit.

Based in New York, Dulchinos joins from AEW Capital Management, where he was head of Debt Portfolio Management, responsible for investing and managing commercial real estate (CRE) debt in stabilized, transitional, and construction strategies. According to an AEW spokesman, Justin Pinckney remains the head of the AEW Debt platform and will oversee our loan portfolios and separately managed accounts.

As head of Real Estate Credit at ORIX USA, which has $26 billion in assets under management, Dulchinos now reports to Jeff Abrams at ORIX USA, who is the group head of Private Credit and Real Estate and is a member of the executive committee. Dulchinos will be responsible for expanding ORIX USA’s third party CRE credit asset management business.

He will serve as a portfolio manager, developing investment products that leverage the firm’s real estate businesses, including Lument, a commercial real estate finance specialist and provider of capital solutions for investors in multifamily, affordable housing, and seniors housing and healthcare real estate.

Dulchinos will collaborate with Jim Flynn, CEO of Lument, to raise and deploy capital for Lument-originated non-agency investment products, expanding the firm’s offerings for existing and prospective investors. More broadly, he will work with ORIX USA’s Real Estate lines of business including the Real Estate Capital Group and Boston Financial to expand origination, oversee third party CRE debt portfolios, and, with ORIX USA’s Investor Solutions team, grow the firm’s investor base and product offerings.

Dulchinos brings over 20 years of experience building and managing global commercial real estate (CRE) platforms. He served as head of Single-Family Rental Portfolio Management at the Amherst Group and worked for a total of 17 years at Barings/MassMutual companies, most recently as head of Real Estate Debt Portfolio Management and Capital Markets at Barings. In that role, he led new CRE debt product development and capital raising for commingled funds and separately managed accounts, and was responsible for portfolio construction, investment allocations, risk-based capital management, as well as global capital markets activity, for the CRE debt platform.

He was also a senior portfolio manager for CRE structured debt products at Cornerstone Real Estate Advisors and a founding member of the CRE high yield team at Babson Capital Management, both of which were Barings/MassMutual companies. Earlier in his career Dulchinos was a practicing attorney, including serving as counsel at MassMutual Life Insurance, where he represented the firm in CRE debt investments, private placements, and mergers and acquisitions.

“Dean is a very strong and experienced addition to our platform and has the ideal background to expand our third party CRE credit offering, connecting our private credit asset management platform with our established real estate businesses to offer investors a set of investment strategies that ORIX USA has been investing in for years,” said ORIX USA’s Abrams.

According to Abrams, ORIX USA sees a compelling market opportunity in real estate private credit over the next few years driven by several factors, including significant near-term CRE debt maturities, structural shifts in the sources of credit for transitional CRE strategies, and the prospect of a moderating interest rate environment.

Dulchinos will leverage these attractive market dynamics and the significant debt origination capacity ORIX USA has in its real estate lines of business with the goal of delivering excellent investment outcomes for third party investors, Abrams added.

This article was originally published by Alternatives Watch.