Jay Hohman has landed a position as managing director at Cohen & Company Capital Markets.
In new his position, Hohman will focus on offering fixed-income products to financial institutions throughout the U.S. John Murphy also joined the firm’s San Francisco office recently. Both hires will report directly to David Clifford, managing director and national sales manager at Cohen.
In February, ASR reported that Hohman was leaving StormHarbour Partners where he was a director primarily responsible for the sale of fixed-income products to institutional investors.
Hohman’s career has been focused on MBS and he has executed in every aspect of the industry including investment banking, sales, trading and structuring. He has headed several mortgage investment banking initiatives and developed the MBS platform at several U.S. broker/dealers. Hohman participated in arranging the first-ever Russian ABS in 2005 and the first Russian MBS in 2006.
Prior to StormHarbour, he was senior vice president at Fundamental Capital Markets where he was senior vice president and where he established the structured products trading desk to market and sell ABS, CMBS, and RMBS to institutional accounts.
Before that, he was also at Russian American Mortgage Co. where he was vice president of securitzation and syndication. He was key in forming the conduit called Russian American Mortgage.
He also held similar roles in Greenwich Financial Servicers, Bear Stearns, Prudential Securities and Exco RMJ International.
With over $170 million in assets, Cohen focuses in the primary markets of many fixed-income products. Its areas of expertise include Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.-guaranteed, structured CDs, new agency bullets, callables, and step-ups, proprietary SBA loan pools, new-issue agency CMOs, CMBS. CDOs, other-fixed income products in the secondary market, including non-agency CMOs, and investment grade and high yield corporate bonds.
The company will soon be launching a commercial mortgage originator from which it will create CMBS. In January, ASR reported that Cohen formed a new venture with FundCore Finance Group to create a commercial real estate (CRE) conduit lender. The conduit will start originating loans in this quarter.
The venture’s primary focus will be writing five- to 10-year CRE fixed-rate loans ranging from $5 million to $75 million. The loans will be targeted for securitization including all major property types.
The firms will originate deals nationally via production offices in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. However, the trading and securitization activities will be managed from the New York office.
FundCore Finance Group is a CRE lending platform mostly focused on the origination of new loans secured by stabilized properties located in the U.S.
It was formed in August 2009 by a select group of senior executives that formerly ran Merrill Lynch Mortgage Lending and the co-founders of Black Creek Group. While at Merrill, the team originated and securitized roughly 2000 loans worth almost $44 billion in the U.S. and Canada.