Josh Zegen

Who they are

Josh Zegen co-founded Madison Realty Capital, the lender that went from an open-ended hard-money fund in 2004 to one of the most prolific private-credit players in CRE. He shares the top of the house with Brian Shatz and Adam Tantleff. Zegen is the firm's public voice: the principal on Bloomberg TV, on podcasts and in the LinkedIn videos. The Promote has noted how well he plays the media game. When Madison upsized its Downtown Brooklyn loan to Simon Dushinsky in 2025, it seeded the news in the trades and then followed a few hours later with a polished, pre-produced LinkedIn video starring Zegen.

His big-picture argument, laid out on the Business Breakdowns podcast in late 2024, is that private credit has gone from a last-resort stepchild to a mainstream option even for blue-chip sponsors. In the early days, he said, private credit was "everything that didn't fall into what a bank could do or even wanted to do." After the GFC, regulated banks would only lend 50-60% of cost, so Madison carved out a niche at 65-75%. He also explained why borrowers value a construction lender who keeps funding through liens and city delays.

Lately Zegen has been pitching the next leg of that thesis: lending to lenders. As regional banks retreat, Madison provides A-notes, warehouse lines and loan-on-loan financing to other debt funds. It did a roughly $220M note-on-note deal with Northwind, for example. He has said another arm of the firm has about $10B in credit facilities out to nearly 100 counterparties. In 2024 he told Bloomberg TV that typical equity buyers "are not really there," with institutions preferring pref and mezz to last-dollar risk. He also observed that below-market seller financing was increasingly being offered to squeeze out the last dollar of price. He remains a fixture of the Miami Beach CREFC circuit, and The Promote spotted him there in January 2026.