Madison Realty Capital
Hard-money upstart turned $20B-plus private-credit heavyweight writing NYC's biggest checks
Who it is
Madison Realty Capital started in 2004 as a hard-money lender and has grown into one of the busiest private-credit shops in CRE, with $20B-plus in AUM. Its Manhattan team is run by principals Josh Zegen, Brian Shatz and Adam Tantleff. In 2022 Madison sold a minority stake to Divesh Makan's Iconiq, the Silicon Valley wealth manager. In 2024 it closed a $2.04B debt fund, its sixth and largest US vehicle (just shy of its $2.25B target). It is a full-stack lender: big construction loans, which it often splits internally into senior and mezz and back-levers, plus note-on-note financing for other debt funds. It also owns a piece of warehouse lender Churchill.
The checks are large and cross-market. They include $400M for Related's Fisher Island condo and $585M for an Arizona Ritz-Carlton. Simon Dushinsky's Downtown Brooklyn rental got $485M, later upsized to $555M and since repaid. Gil Dezer's Bentley tower got $630M, and the Tavros-led LIC skyscraper got about $425M. The signature deal is the $720M loan to Nathan Berman and David Werner for the former Pfizer HQ, the largest office-to-resi financing on record and the biggest in Madison's history. A July 2026 structural incident at that site put the loan in the spotlight. In mid-2026 Madison also took the full $480M senior loan on Yellowstone's office conversion.
Madison is also a loan-to-own operator. It took title to Rafi Toledano's East Village buildings out of bankruptcy and took much of Neil Shekhter's LA portfolio via deeds-in-lieu, then planned a Santa Monica tower on one site. In 2025 it credit-bid for Eli Karp's Flatbush project. That posture brings fights. Karp has sued Madison, Five Star won a round against it over a $2B resort, and Penn-Florida alleged in an August 2026 suit that Madison manufactured the defaults it is using to foreclose on Boca's Mandarin Oriental condo. Madison's response to the Penn-Florida allegations was not reported.
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