Dennis L. Ruben

Dennis L. Ruben is executive managing director of NRC Realty & Capital Advisors LLC, Chicago, and has over 30 years of experience in the structuring, negotiation and documentation of commercial real estate lease and loan transactions ranging in size from $1 million to $250 million. In addition, he has extensive experience in real estate workouts, restructures, lease modifications and terminations, and bankruptcies involving convenience stores, gasoline stations, hotels, shopping centers, restaurants and other single-tenant retail properties. Since joining NRC in 2004, Ruben has led the company’s financial advisory services group, and has supervised mergers and acquisitions and other real estate transactions, particularly in the convenience store sector, in excess of $1 billion. Prior to joining NRC, Ruben served as executive vice president, general counsel and secretary of GE Capital Franchise Finance Corp., a $10-billion business unit of GE Capital Corp. GEFF was the successor by merger to Franchise Finance Corporation of America, which was, prior to its acquisition by GE Capital Corporation in 2004, a New York Stock Exchange real-estate investment trust specializing in single-tenant franchised real estate. He was primarily responsible for the structuring and negotiation of all of the company’s real-estate acquisition and loan transactions. Ruben also had primary responsibility for the completion of FFCA’s term securitizations totaling in excess of $2 billion, and he routinely worked with investors, investment bankers, rating agencies and monoline insurers. Ruben has either moderated or appeared on numerous panels sponsored by the NACS, SIGMA and the Outlook Conference pertaining to the financial and capital markets in the convenience store industry. He has also written numerous articles on these topics for CSP Magazine and CSP Daily News, the leading trade publications for the convenience store industry. Ruben has also appeared on several panels dealing with franchise loan securitization, real estate and real-estate finance, and defaults, workouts, restructures and bankruptcy relative to franchise and commercial real estate loans. He is a member of the Iowa, Nebraska and Colorado Bars, and is a member of the American Bankruptcy Institute.