One year after launching its first mutual fund, a New York City-based firm is preparing a marketing push.

"We're going to start marketing in the new year," Tom Harney, head of merchant bank and capital markets at Ladder Capital, tells MFWire. "We have an internal team that will be looking to coordinate the efforts. We'll be open to potentially hiring people to be helpful on this, internally or externally."

The marketing push follows the recent addition of the Ladder Select Bond Fund to the Charles Schwab, Pershing, and TD Ameritrade platforms.

"It is early stage and we're happy to be on these platforms," Harney says. "We'll be deploying into those markets in 2018."

Ladder Capital is a publicly-traded REIT with about $6 billion in assets. Harney describes Ladder as "one of the most active non-bank commercial real estate lenders." The firm has made $31 billion worth of commercial real estate investments since inception in October 2008, including almost $9.7 billion of investments in commercial mortgage backed securities (CMBS). Its mutual fund debuted in October 2016.

CMBS, Harney says, was "a somewhat undiscovered asset class" when Ladder debuted its fund last year.

"There was no pure-play, daily liquidity mutual fund," Harney says.

The strategy is a complement to traditional bond fund portfolios, Harney says. And launching a mutual fund was just "a natural extension of Ladder as a platform," says Craig Sedmak, managing director and PM of the fund,

"We like the dynamics from an investor perspective," Harney says.

In addition to working with platforms, Sedmak says, the Ladder Capital team is going to spend lots of time "with some of the modelers, the research entities." 

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