JPMorgan's Real Estate Banking Head Leaves To Launch Private Equity Firm

Chad Tredway, who has been the lead real estate lender at the world's largest bank since 2017, has left to set up his own real estate investment shop.

Tredway, formerly the group head and managing director of real estate banking at JPMorgan, is launching a new firm with $250M in equity from an unnamed investor to invest in U.S. real estate, he said this week.

“Like so many of you during Covid, I had a bit of a midlife crisis and left to start my own company,” Tredway told the audience at the CREtech conference in New York City Wednesday. "I understand what it's like to operate and look at technology in real estate at a place like JPMorgan, the biggest bank in the country and now, like many of you ... have become an entrepreneur."

He didn’t go into further specifics; his LinkedIn profile lists him as a managing principal at a private equity real estate fund since July and that he was group head and managing director of real estate banking between May 2017 and October 2021.

“We are determining exactly what [our strategy is] going to look like as we pivot, just given what's going on in the markets," he said of the fund. "But it'll be real estate, it'll be process-driven, and hopefully we'll scale.” 

JPMorgan still lists him as a managing director on its website as of Thursday afternoon. JPMorgan declined to comment, and Tredway didn't respond to a LinkedIn message asking for comment.

“Life's not a dress rehearsal. So for folks that are thinking about potentially starting something and don't really know if they want to or may not have the confidence, I would just encourage you to say, if it's in your heart to try and build and to do something, go ahead and do it,” he said on stage. ”I felt like I'm on the Earth one time and I really wanted to see what I can do.”

He added that the liquidity in the market indicated to him there are enough opportunities to carve out space for his new firm.

“The world's long on money and short on ideas,” he said. "That feels like a pretty good opportunity."

Tredway was in conversation with Chase Garbarino, the CEO of tenant experience software platform HqO, which counts Tredway as a board member. In an interview after the conversation, Garbarino told Bisnow he had been pursuing Tredway for a year to join his company’s board as an independent chair.

“Chad is really well-known in the real estate world because he is pretty unique in that he's really tech-forward, and obviously real estate is a little bit behind the times,” he said. “He's a tremendously nice guy, someone who's accomplished. He's just really humble and down-to-earth, so we were lucky when I heard he was starting his own thing, obviously, it became easier to get him on the board.”

Tredway was elevated to the joint head of real estate lending in 2017, having previously led the bank's Eastern commercial term lending division after being hired from UBS. 

In a Business Insider article last month, Tredway was quoted as an active JPMorgan executive and praised the bank’s work to combat racial inequality. It is unclear when his last day working for the Manhattan-based financial giant was.

"The firm is really weaving diversity and inclusion into the DNA of what we do every single day," Tredway told Insider last month. "JPMorgan has done a fantastic job as we're having the dialogue around people's differences, around structural inequities, and around how we can combat that."