SAN FRANCISCO - Lancaster Pollard & Co., a boutique health care and housing investment bank, last week hired Anthony Taddey to head a new Los Angeles office.
Taddey, who headed RBC Capital Markets' California operations until June, will serve as senior banker and regional manager for the California market. Los Angeles is the seventh location for Columbus, Ohio-based Lancaster Pollard. It also has offices in Atlanta, Austin, Denver, Kansas City, Kan., and New York.
Taddey "knows the nuances of California public finance, and he cares about these sectors," said Lancaster Pollard chief executive officer Thomas Green.
Lancaster Pollard, which was founded in 1988, specializes in bond underwriting and federally insured mortgage financing for hospitals, senior living, and affordable housing providers.
Taddey has worked in public finance since the 1970s. He has headed West Coast public finance operations at Merrill Lynch & Co., Banc of America Securities, and Morgan Stanley. Early in his career, he was a health care banker and headed Merrill Lynch's health care practice in New York for a decade, working on tax-exempt financings and federally supported programs such as the Federal Housing Administration Section 242 hospital mortgage insurance program, which is one of Lancaster Pollard's specialties.
Green said Lancaster Pollard plans to hire several senior bankers over the next few months in California and in New York City.
"We've been growing steadily over the past several years, and frankly, we're just continuing on that march," Green said in an interview. "The dislocations and disruptions in the financial services business ... may offer a unique opportunity to step into some vacant relationships."
California looks like an opportunity for Lancaster Pollard because many of its hospitals and health care facilities need seismic retrofitting to meet state earthquake safety standards.
"The California market offers an enormous opportunity for our firm," Green said. "In our space, which is health care or senior living, there are a lot of organizations that are not only in California substantially, but are headquartered in California with facilities that are scattered across the country."
"This is an underserved market," Taddey said. He said Lancaster Pollard's "bread and butter" clients are small- to mid-market health care providers, which have been hard hit by the failure of the bond insurance industry.
Taddey said the firm's parent company runs a combination of businesses that focus on senior living and health care in different ways and help complete deals regardless of market conditions.
In addition to the investment bank, the company owns Lancaster Pollard Mortgage Co., which provides mortgage insurance to support capital financings through government agencies. The mortgage unit is an HFA-approved mortgagee, a Government National Mortgage Association insurer, as well as a Fannie Mae and U.S. Department of Agriculture lender. It also owns an investment advisory group.
"The capital markets have changed a lot in just the last couple of years," with the collapse of bond insurers and the scarcity of cheap bank letters of credit, Taddey said. "I think there's going to be a place out there for government guarantees and government insurance in health care through the HUD, USDA, and Fannie Mae programs to a greater degree than we've seen before."
