Mr. Messersmith, a Managing Director of Westwood Capital, has over twenty-five years of corporate finance, restructuring and investment banking experience, and has worked as both an operational executive and as an advisor. Mr. Messersmith is heavily focused on the firm’s real estate and securitization practice, which includes clients and advisory assignments in a number of areas, including: large-scale residential homebuilding, multi-family property acquisition and development finance, as well as hospitality, entertainment, gaming, and retail. He has worked on projects in the United States, the Caribbean, China, Vietnam, and Japan.

Throughout his career, Mr. Messersmith has been involved in rated and un-rated asset securitizations, debt and equity capital raises, merger and acquisition transactions, real estate project finance, and financial restructuring advisory services. He has also advised clients in heavy industry and the power generation sector, including those involved in renewable energy. In addition to his real estate and project finance experience, Mr. Messersmith has been involved in numerous media transactions including being a key executive in a firm responsible for the financing of over $1 billion of full-length motion pictures, and intimately involved in that firm’s sale of the resulting film library to a large public media company. He has been involved in one of the first securitizations of music royalties in the 1990s. Earlier in his career he also founded and co-founded a number of companies in the technology and technology-services sector, including one that was acquired by one of its customers, a large privately-held media production company.

Mr. Messersmith has also served as a restructuring and turnaround consultant, where he was, where he was staffed on projects in the commercial finance and retail sectors, as well as one of the largest global international out-of-court restructurings in history, involving the restructuring of over $13.5 billion of debt. Prior positions also included an operational role in the Sony Corporation of America’s theater division. Mr. Messersmith started his post-college career at Merrill Lynch, Inc.

Mr. Messersmith received his B.S. from Cornell University in Applied Economics, with a minor in Animal Science, and his M.B.A. in Finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He resides in New Jersey.