GRACE HUEBSCHER
Grace Huebscher has spent a career crunching the complicated numbers behind real estate transactions. Her greatest success was recently selling Beech Street Capital, the mortgage banking company she launched in 2009, to Capital One. (The deal closed last November.) She’s still in charge of her fast-growing firm, which is the sixth biggest issuer of Fannie, Freddie, and FHA loans, and now serves as president of Capital One’s agency multifamily lending. It all started in college when one of Grace’s majors at Kenyon College was economics. (The other was Spanish lit.) Her first post-college job was at Chase Manhattan Bank, which she’s described as a mini MBA program. She spent several years in banking, including wearing the CEO hat at National Cooperative Bank Mortgage Co. Colleagues have said she handles high-pressure situations with aplomb and is a master of diplomatic skills.
