Real Estate

Eli Hattem

Managing Partner, Lateral Partners LLC;
Managing Partner, Derby Real Estate Capital

Eli Hattem is an expert with over thirty-five years of experience in commercial real estate (CRE) debt and equity capital markets, investment management, and asset management. Having worked on transactions totaling over $30 billion for large U.S. and Canadian commercial and investment banks, Mr. Hattem has wide-ranging experience with CRE debt and equity finance and operations issues.

Mr. Hattem has testified in depositions and court proceedings and served as an expert witness in matters involving alleged breaches of contract, material adverse events (MAEs), valuation, damages, and financial modeling.

During his career as a CRE professional, Mr. Hattem has addressed issues related to underwriting, deal origination, debt and equity syndication, commercial mortgage-backed securities and CMBS securitization, acquisitions of property and nonperforming loans, workouts and foreclosures, whole loan sales, loan and asset valuations, and debt and equity brokerage. Mr. Hattem has direct experience with many CRE-related financial products, including fixed-rate and floating-rate debt, bridge loans, construction loans, revolvers and lines of credit, warehouse facilities, letters of credit, repurchase agreements, B-notes, mezzanine loans, preferred equity, equity, and interest rate swaps and caps.

Through Lateral Partners, Mr. Hattem has significant experience acquiring and owning CRE assets, including the structuring, syndication, and modeling of general partner (GP) and limited partner (LP) equity interests. He is proficient in the legal and other documentation that govern debt and equity transactions. With respect to asset types, Mr. Hattem has worked on transactions involving most commercial property types, including multifamily rentals, condominiums and cooperatives, office, retail, hospitality, industrial, self-storage, land, medical office, mobile home parks, mixed-use properties, assisted living, and single-family rentals.

In addition to transactional expertise, Mr. Hattem has significant hands-on experience in structuring, building, and managing profitable CRE lending platforms; founding new investment and advisory ventures; and creating financial models to analyze CRE debt instruments and complex equity structures.

Mr. Hattem has held senior management roles at Merrill Lynch Mortgage Lending; CIBC Capital Markets; Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (later merged into Credit Suisse First Boston); and Chase Manhattan Bank. At CIBC, he oversaw the CMBS lending business, including heading up credit and underwriting, pricing, operations and staffing, and loan syndication and securitization. At Merrill Lynch, he served as chief operating officer of the CMBS conduit, headed the underwriting and closing groups, and was a voting member of the firm’s credit committee. While at Merrill Lynch, Mr. Hattem led a team of consultants and programmers to develop and build a comprehensive loan origination, underwriting, closing, and securitization environment to manage and run its CRE lending business.

Mr. Hattem was a founding partner at Park Bridge Financial, a boutique direct investment and advisory business whose clients include real estate investment trusts (REITs), CMBS trusts, private equity firms, opportunity funds, loan servicers and special servicers, and middle market owner/operators of CRE.

At Lateral Partners and Derby Real Estate Capital, where he is also a founding partner, Mr. Hattem leads CRE investment and related asset management and transaction activities, including origination, capital sourcing, underwriting, structuring, documentation, financial modeling, and asset management, as well as third-party debt and equity brokerage.

Eric H. Sussman

Adjunct Professor of Accounting,
UCLA Anderson School of Management,
University of California, Los Angeles;
Founding Partner, Clear Capital LLC

Eric Sussman is an accounting and real estate expert who focuses on financial reporting and accounting, real estate investment, finance, and management. Professor Sussman has extensive experience as an expert witness and consultant for commercial litigation. He has testified in numerous matters involving corporate financial reporting and disclosure, audit effectiveness, valuation, real estate due diligence, real estate investment trusts (REITs), fiduciary duties, and economic damages analyses.

At UCLA Anderson, Professor Sussman has more than two decades of experience teaching courses on cost/managerial accounting, financial accounting, financial statement analysis, equity valuation, corporate financial reporting, and real estate investment and finance. He is a ten-time winner of the M.B.A. Teaching Excellence Award, a seven-time winner of the FEMBA Teaching Excellence Award, as voted by M.B.A. graduates, and a recipient of numerous other teaching awards and national recognitions.

Professor Sussman has been retained by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Internal Revenue Service to analyze investment and tax issues related to real estate.

Throughout his teaching career, Professor Sussman has remained active in the real estate industry. As a founding partner of Clear Capital, LLC, a real estate investment firm, he oversees capital, equity, and debt functions, as well as private equity, joint venture, and fund formation activities. Earlier in his career, Professor Sussman worked as an audit manager for PriceWaterhouse. He is the creator of an analytical software tool that measures, evaluates, and reports on the financial accounting and corporate reporting risk for public companies via EDGAR Online.

Andrea L. Eisfeldt

Laurence D. and Lori W. Fink Endowed Chair in Finance,
Professor of Finance,
UCLA Anderson School of Management,
University of California, Los Angeles

Andrea Eisfeldt is an expert on financial markets. Professor Eisfeldt’s current research includes financial economic issues related to market liquidity, traditional and intangible asset valuation, the impact of generative artificial intelligence (AI) on firm values, bank products and valuation, over-the-counter (OTC) markets, and equity-based compensation.

Professor Eisfeldt has been retained as an expert witness in numerous finance matters, analyzing a range of issues that include valuation, financial institutions, investment, and fixed income and derivatives, as well as FinTech and crypto assets. In securities class actions, she has addressed class certification, loss causation, and damages issues. Professor Eisfeldt has testified in depositions, arbitrations, and trials.

Professor Eisfeldt holds editorial roles at leading academic journals and has published articles in the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Monetary Economics, Real Estate Economics, and Econometrica, among other highly regarded research outlets. Her work has been awarded best paper prizes by the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and Real Estate Economics.

At the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Professor Eisfeldt is a research associate in the programs for asset pricing, corporate finance, and economic fluctuations and growth.

Professor Eisfeldt is a member of the board of directors of the UCLA Investment Company, which manages part of the University’s endowment. She has also served on the board of the American Finance Association as a member of the investments, ethics, and strategic planning committees. She also serves as an academic advisor to Vise, a FinTech investment management firm. Professor Eisfeldt’s research on valuing intangible assets led to the creation of the Next Intangible Indices used in the Simplify NXTI ETF.

In addition to her more than two decades in finance research and teaching, Professor Eisfeldt has extensive asset management experience, including as chief economist at Structured Portfolio Management and as a consultant to AQR Capital Management.

At UCLA Anderson, Professor Eisfeldt teaches courses on bonds, options and currencies, corporate finance, FinTech, and cryptocurrency. Previously, she spent a decade at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, receiving tenure in 2007.