Lisa joined the Commercial Real Estate Finance Council (CREFC) as Executive Director in September 2016. Prior to joining CREFC, she spent over 25 years in the fixed-income structured-finance markets; first in the MBS/ABS markets and then, beginning in 1998, the CMBS market. Throughout this time, she served as a research analyst/trading desk strategist.

Lisa has been a top-ranked research analyst in the highly competitive Institutional Investor All-American Fixed-Income Research Team and Orion surveys in the CMBS category. Throughout her career, she provided analysis and commentary on commercial real estate credit fundamentals and relative value within the private-label and agency CMBS and structured-product markets, and published several articles and reports on various aspects of the CMBS markets that appear in industry handbooks and academic journals.

Prior to joining CREFC, Lisa was with Jefferies Group LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Leucadia National Corporation. She joined Jefferies in July 2009 as a Managing Director and Head of CMBS Strategy and Risk in the Fixed Income Division’s MBS/ABS/CMBS Group. Before joining Jefferies, she was a Managing Director in the Fixed-Income Strategies Group at the Royal Bank of Scotland/Greenwich Capital, where she worked for eight years. Ms. Pendergast began her career in 1987 as a research analyst focused on residential and commercial MBS at Prudential Securities.

Lisa has a long history with the CRE Finance Council, having served as President of the Board of Governors in 2010 and as a Board member from 2001 through 2010.