Lisa Pendergast

Lisa Pendergast is the current Executive Director of Commercial Real Estate Finance Council (CREFC), was the 2010/2011 President and formerly a member of CREFC’s Board of Governors for over nine years. Ms. Pendergast previously served on the Editorial Board of CREFC’s CRE Finance World. Lisa has been a top-ranked research analyst in the highly competitive Institutional Investor All-American Fixed-Income Research Team survey in the CMBS category. She has published several articles and reports on various aspects of the CMBS markets that appear in industry handbooks and academic journals, and is often quoted in the financial press on commercial real estate debt-related issues.

Prior to CREFC, Lisa Pendergast was with Jefferies LLC, the principal operating subsidiary of Jefferies Group LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Leucadia National Corporation (NYSE: LUK), in July 2009 as a Managing Director and Head of CMBS Strategy and Risk in the Fixed Income Division’s MBS/ABS/CMBS Group. In her current role, Ms. Pendergast provides analysis and commentary on commercial real estate credit fundamentals and relative value within the private-label and agency CMBS and structured-product markets. Ms. Pendergast has more than 25 years of industry experience in the structured-finance markets.

Before joining Jefferies, Pendergast was a Managing Director in the Fixed-Income Strategies Group at the Royal Bank of Scotland, where she worked for eight years. Early on in her career, Ms. Pendergast focused on the residential MBS marketplace as a research analyst at Prudential Securities, authoring reports on various securitization structures and mortgage-related bond analyses, such as option-adjusted spreads.