Atlanta Retail & Hospitality Conference

Lauren Ball was promoted to Chief Operating Officer at Westwood Financial in 2023, bringing with her a career spanning over 18 years and $865 million in transactions. Since joining Westwood Financial as the firm’s first Senior Vice President and Head of Leasing in 2021, Ball has driven the leasing team to achieve the highest percentage of leased space in the company’s history. As COO, she now oversees a team of 35 top professionals across leasing, construction, legal, marketing, and property management. Under her leadership, significant achievements have been realized. Before joining Westwood Financial, Ball served as Vice President of Leasing for SITE Centers, managing a retail portfolio totaling 18 million square feet throughout the Southeast. Her commercial real estate career boasts over $1 billion in transactions across the United States. Ball holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Colorado.

Amy Fingerhut is a Senior Vice President in CBRE’s Atlanta Retail Services Group. Her duties include project leasing and tenant representation with a specialty in street retail, restaurant site selection and the backfill of existing restaurant spaces. Ms. Fingerhut is responsible for the marketing, leasing and pre-leasing of new and existing developments ranging from mixed-use in-town developments, high street retail and specialty centers. She also represents several national, regional and local tenants in site selection and expansion in metro Atlanta and the state of Georgia. Prior to joining CBRE, Ms. Fingerhut was a leasing representative with Colliers International where she gained experience in successfully leasing all types of retail developments from ground-up, grocery-anchored centers to unanchored strip centers. Ms. Fingerhut has worked closely with landlords throughout all phases of the retail development lifecycle from inception to completion, including building design, proforma analysis, tenant mix, market analysis and lease negotiations. Ms. Fingerhut also gained experience as a leasing representative for Pellerin & Salomon Real Estate Services, a shopping center development company. Before starting on the brokerage side, Ms. Fingerhut spent five years with Deloitte Tax LLP as a Senior Property Tax Consultant, appealing commercial real estate values all over the Southeast in order to reduce the tax liability for the owners.

Kirkland Carden, a former Duluth City Council member, was first elected to the District 1 seat of the Gwinnett County Board of Commissioners in 2020. District 1 includes the cities of Berkeley Lake, Duluth, Norcross, Peachtree Corners, and portions of Suwanee and Lawrenceville. At age 29, he was elected to the Duluth City Council, becoming the first millennial and the first African-American council member in the city. An Ohio native, Kirkland's family relocated to Duluth in 2004. In 2007, Kirkland graduated from Duluth High School. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in political science from Georgia State University. Carden was elected to the Duluth City Council in 2017. He also served on the Duluth Urban Redevelopment Authority. In his professional capacity, he has assisted state and local governments in developing, maintaining, and implementing transportation plans. Additional responsibilities have included budget oversight and facilitating compliance with local land use and zoning ordinances. For the past decade, he has volunteered as a member of the Duluth Zoning Board of Appeals, Duluth Citizens Budget Advisory Committee, Rainbow Village Millennials Advisory Panel, Gwinnett 101, and the Duluth Fall Festival. The Georgia Municipal Association named him to the 2019 inaugural cohort of the 20 Under 40 Focus Group.

Scott Israel is a 13+ year veteran, Principal and Vice President with Colliers International. Scott is responsible for originating multi-tenant and single tenant retail investment sales transactions. Scott has personally closed over 305 transactions exceeding $1.3B in volume during his real estate career. Prior to joining Colliers in 2020, Scott was a member of CBRE’s National Retail Partners for 3 years. Prior to joining CBRE in 2017, Scott was a Principal and Practice Leader at Skylines Seven Real Estate, focusing on property disposition and landlord leasing representation during his six-year tenure. Scott previously served on the board of Young Atlanta Retail Alliance (YARA), a networking group focused on bringing retail experts together, and has been a member of The International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) for more than 12 years.

David Marvin, founder and president of Legacy Ventures®, was an early believer in downtown Atlanta’s resurgence. Since making his first investment downtown in 1994, Marvin has developed $500 million in downtown real estate. Atlanta tested Legacy, but the firm has expanded its footprint regionally. In addition to development, Legacy today has hotel and restaurant operating divisions that employ roundly 1,000 people. Legacy’s in-house financial, marketing, design and construction teams represent collaborative resources for its development, asset management, and operations initiatives. Marvin’s professional career began as a graduate engineer on the docks of Electric Boat Naval Shipyard. Ten years into his career, Marvin transitioned from construction to real estate. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Vermont, an MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Master’s of Science degree in Real Estate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a licensed Professional Engineer and is active on several civic boards, including the Atlanta Rotary Club, Central Atlanta Progress, the Atlanta Downtown Improvement District Board, Chair of ADID Interagency Law Enforcement Task Force, the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau Board, the Atlanta Hospitality Alliance, the Georgia State University School of Hospitality’s Advisory Board, Partners for HOME Board and is the Founder/Chairman of the Centennial Park District®.

He focuses on the company’s investment and capital deployment strategies and oversees a real estate portfolio with a market capitalization of approximately $6 billion. He joined Peachtree in 2015 and has contributed significantly to Peachtree's growth and investment performance. Throughout his 20-plus-year career, Brian has had experience investing and managing a broad range of asset and portfolio types. Brian is a graduate of the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, where he completed a dual concentration in Real Estate and Finance. In addition, he serves as a board member for the Atlanta Ronald McDonald House Charities and High Meadows School.

Teague Hunter is President and Chief Executive Officer of Hunter Hotel Advisors, the nation’s leading investment advisory firm focused exclusively on the hotel industry. With over 25 years of experience and a successful track record that spans a full spectrum of hotel transactions, Mr. Hunter has led Hunter Hotel Advisors to complete over $15 billion in transactions including $2.4 billion closed in the past 24 months. These transactions include single asset and portfolio sales for the industry’s most influential financial institutions, REIT’s and private equity firms. Founded in 1978, Hunter Hotel Advisors has a team of seasoned investment professionals located across eight offices nationwide. Hunter serves as a liaison between Main Street and Wall Street, combining its unique knowledge of the global economy with its local market expertise to provide clients with tailored advisory services necessary to successfully execute complex transactions while delivering optimal results.

Chantal Wu has been in the hospitality industry for over 15 years and is currently Vice President, Investments and Development at Auro Hotels. She is responsible for sourcing and underwriting acquisition targets, managing ground-up developments including evaluating land parcels, analyzing the existing portfolio to identify conversion, disposition, and value enhancement opportunities, and asset managing non-hospitality assets the company owns. Prior to Auro, Chantal worked for Davidson Hospitality Group as Director of Operations Strategy, Reporting and Analytics. Before joining Davidson, Chantal was part of the Investment Analysis team at IHG. She underwrote upscale and above brands across the Americas region, specializing in the top 25 US markets and Latin America. Chantal also spent time as a feasibility consultant with PKF Consulting (now part of CBRE). Chantal graduated from the Walter A. Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University with a Master of Management in Hospitality. Chantal is originally from Beijing, China and currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband and their six-year-old daughter. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling, snowboarding, and spending time with family.

Jay Patel is a principal with JMS Family Office and directs all investment activities of the fund. Mr. Patel is responsible for origination, underwriting, financing, execution and disposition of all investments, including litigation against borrowers. Since founding JMS, Mr. Patel has acquired in excess of $250MM of distressed commercial real estate debt and owns or has developed a number of hotel properties. Mr. Patel serves on the board of Budgetel Franchise System, which he and several investors purchased from the Blackstone Group in 2007. Mr. Patel also serves on the board of Inn Distributors, which is a Platinum LEED hotel furniture, fixtures and equipment manufacturer affiliate of the iEVO Group in Udaipur, India. Mr. Patel was formerly an investment banker in the Principal Finance Group and the Structured Finance Group at Goldman Sachs & Co. in New York, NY. His responsibilities included advising financial sponsors on LBO and M&A transactions, executing private equity investments, and securitization on transactions totaling $60+ billion. While at Goldman Sachs, Mr. Patel advised Ford Motor Company on the sale of Triad Financial, a subprime auto finance company, for $2.1 billion and invested $100 million equity with the buyer consortium. Mr. Patel advised on both the sale and LBO financing of Hertz to a private equity consortium for $17.1 billion, in addition to structuring and the executing a $4.2 billion rental car securitization. Additionally, Mr. Patel worked on Aramark’s sale to GS Capital Partners and a private equity consortium for $8.3 billion and Lord & Taylor’s sale to Federated Department Stores for $1.2 billion. Mr. Patel formed a JV with Huntington National Bank to purchase $100MM of auto loan originations per month, warehouse and securitize the assets in GSALT. Generally, Mr. Patel was involved in the financial engineering, trading and arbitrage of loan pools through securitization and credit default swap derivatives. Other notable clients Mr. Patel advised were General Electric, Capital One, Citibank, MBNA, Providian and GMAC. Prior to working at Goldman Sachs, Mr. Patel served as a capital markets analyst for GE Capital in Connecticut where he executed credit card, aircraft, equipment, real estate and healthcare securitizations and assisted in managing a $40 billion investment portfolio. Mr. Patel earned a B.A. in Economics at New York University in 2003 and attended the London School of Economics. He is licensed by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) for Series 7 and 63 and conversational in French, Spanish and Gujarati.