May 22, 2019 - Los Angeles, CA -- PeerStreet, a marketplace for investing in real estate backed loans, has announced the appointment of Deepa Salastekar as the Vice President of Institutional Sales. Ms. Salastekar joins PeerStreet to expand the company’s relationship base of institutional partners across all investment types available through PeerStreet.
As PeerStreet’s Vice President of Institutional Sales, Ms. Salastekar will lead the strategy and communications for the growing number of financial institutions seeking to invest in fractional or whole loans on PeerStreet. She brings more than 20 years of experience in capital markets, including nine years as a Senior Vice President at Pacific Investment Management Company in Alternative Sales, eight years at Bear Stearns & Co, Inc. as a Managing Director in Fixed Income Institutional Sales of Derivatives, and most recently as Co-Head of Securities for Inveniam Capital Partners, a platform focused on blockchain-enabled tokens for private debt. She holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a BA from Rutgers University.
“We are currently experiencing great demand from investors of all stripes, including institutional investors, and we are lucky to be able to bring someone of Deepa’s caliber on board to manage this growth,” said Brew Johnson, co-founder and CEO of PeerStreet. “We can’t wait to see where her leadership takes us.”
Ms. Salastekar’s experience in building businesses across institutional and retail channels demonstrates her expertise in sales and product development in fixed income markets and alternative investments. Her background will be essential in executing on a strategy to develop sales, marketing and investor relations functions for PeerStreet’s institutional audience. With a career focused on mortgage credit sectors and private credit, she brings valuable insight to PeerStreet’s capital markets team to meet and facilitate institutional demand.
“While institutional investors have liked investing in mortgages originated by private lenders, it was challenging for them to get both volume and diversification, especially in markets like fix and flip and Residential for Rent because the markets are so fragmented,” said Ms. Salastekar. “PeerStreet immediately resonated with me because it solves real problems for institutions by making it dramatically easier to access and diversify across investments in fragmented markets.”
Ms. Salastekar is the latest executive hire to an expanding team of capital markets professionals. She joins Louis Nees, PeerStreet’s Head of Capital Markets, who joined the company in September 2017 after 30 years of experience on Wall Street, most recently as CEO of Walter Capital Opportunity. The team is further supported by Bob Brown’s rich investment banking experience—with tenures at Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers, including an extensive history of advising C-level executives in the financial services and FinTech sectors. Several key hires have been made over the previous year as PeerStreet enters its fifth year in business and continues its rapid growth. In March 2019, the company surpassed $2 billion transacted on the platform.
