Justin Kennedy

Co-CEO & CIO, Justin Kennedy, leads Grass River’s investment activities and strategic direction. Justin’s 29 years of experience span real estate finance, investment and development across US and international markets. Prior to founding Grass River, Justin served with Toby Cobb as Co-CEO of LNR Property, LLC; one of the world’s most influential and diversified real estate investment and services companies. Justin led LNR’s global real estate investment activities and its nationwide real estate development business. Justin and Toby led a firm-wide repositioning of LNR’s global operations, including start up of several highly profitable new business units, culminating with LNR’s $1+bn sale to affiliates of Starwood Capital in 2013. Prior to LNR, Justin served as Managing Director and Global Head of Real Estate Capital Markets at Deutsche Bank. Justin was a founding member of DB’s market-leading, $50+billion Global Commercial Real Estate business unit (“GCRE”); he led trading, structuring, syndication and risk management across GCRE’s global finance, origination and servicing platform. Justin is credited as one of a few Wall Street traders who predicted the 2008 financial crisis; he designed and executed the 2006 strategy that hedged GCRE loss exposure during the crisis. From the onset of the crisis, Justin and Toby played significant roles with various regulatory agencies in design and implementation of several crisis response programs. Prior to DB, Justin was Vice President and Head of CMBS Trading at Goldman Sachs where he co-led start up of the Archon CMBS conduit and Grande Loan origination and distribution platforms. Prior to CMBS trading, Justin was an early member of the Principal Investment Group, the firm’s proprietary asset based investment business led by Pete Briger. Justin spent the first 8 years of his career in the real estate development business in California and Colorado focused on large planned community developments. Justin received an AB in Economics from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA.