Biography

Brian P. Lancaster is a Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Finance at the Columbia University Business School.  Professor Lancaster teaches the following courses: Real Estate Finance, Real Estate Debt Markets, Residential Real Estate Finance, Capital Markets, Real Estate Entrepreneurship, and  Debt Markets in the MBA and EMBA programs. He is also a faculty sponsor of Chazen Global Study Tours, most recently leading a student real estate study tour to Southeast Asia.  Formerly, he taught the Real Estate Capital Markets and Debt Markets and Instruments courses in the MBA and EMBA programs at the Stern School of Business, New York University.   

Professor Lancaster is also Founder and President of The Minot Group, LLC, a real estate finance, debt and derivatives markets consulting and investment firm. Domestic and international clients include:  Alliance Bernstein, Alinma Investment Co., Centerbridge, China Construction Bank, Citadel, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Fidelity, Fortress, FHLB, Goldman Sachs, Housing Finance Fund of Iceland, McKinley and Co., McKinsey and Co., McGraw Hill, MFS Investment Mgmt., Parthenon Capital, Ping An of China, Verisk, and Wells Fargo. The Minot Group, LLC was voted one of America’s Best Management Consulting Firms by Forbes in 2017, 2018 and 2019.  Recent projects include consulting with the FHLB regarding REITs, developing a callable bond program to finance callable residential mortgages, developing a new CRE finance data, analytics and capital markets business for a large global analytics firm and developing two multifamily projects. 

Prior to his current work, Professor Lancaster was Managing Director and Co-head of Structured Transactions Analytics, Risk and Strategy and Head of MBS, CMBS, and ABS Strategy at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). Prior to joining RBS, Professor Lancaster was the Chief Investment Officer of the $85 billion Real Estate Division of Wells Fargo/Wachovia and Head of Structured Products Research at the same company for nine years.  He was also a Managing Director Principal at Bear Stearns where he led research teams in Agency MBS, CMOs and CMBS for eleven years.  He was voted by clients onto Institutional Investor’s All America Research team as a top three research analyst for several years.  He was also a Senior Economist Capital Markets at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of England in London for five years. 

Professor Lancaster received his BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his MBA from the Stern School of Business, NYU and a Masters of Public and International Affairs from Columbia University where he was selected as an International Fellow.

He is a former Executive Board member of the Mortgage Bankers Association and the Commercial Real Estate Finance Council, where he testified before the House Financial Services Committee, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of the Controller of the Currency and the US Treasury Department on the real estate crisis, the capital markets and financial regulations. 

Professor Lancaster has published two books, including Structured Products and Related Credit Derivatives with Frank Fabozzi and Glenn Schultz, Wiley Publishing and numerous journal articles on topics related to real estate, capital markets and securitization. He is the former Editor-in Chief of the Commercial Real Estate Finance Journal.   He has also lectured occasionally at Duke University and the Wharton School of Business.