Petros PACE Finance, one of the early pioneers in the Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (C-PACE) lending space, will soon have a new leader guiding the financing strategy.

The C-PACE lender announced Monday that Kevin McMeen of Midcap Financial, an Apollo Global Management affiliate, will be assuming the role of president and CEO effective July 1, Commercial Observer can first report. McMeen will replace current CEO Mansoor Ghori, who along with fellow co-founder and CFO, Jim Stanislaus, will transition into the vice chairman role through December 2025.

Ghori said the leadership change is more than three years in the making following Apollo subsidiary, Athene Holdings, acquiring Texas-based Petros in early 2022.

“The intention was to at some point transition this into someone else’s hand so that we can kind of let our baby go and let this thing continue to grow,” Ghori told CO. “Once we got bought by Apollo, we really spent a lot of time trying to position the company for long-term success working within the confines of Apollo and what they wanted to see out of the company.”

Petros had been working closely with Apollo on a transition plan for over a year, according to Ghori, and brought McMeen on board in January. After McMeen worked in various roles, including operations and underwriting, Ghori and Stanislaus decided to appoint him to the CEO role starting in July.

McMeen arrived at Petros after serving as co-founder and president of MidCap’s real estate group since 2008. Prior to launching MidCap, McMeen oversaw health care real estate in executive positions at Merrill Lynch, GE Capital and Heller Financial.

The finance veteran will take over Petros at a time when it has nearly $2 billion in balance sheet C-PACE loans, according to the lender. Petros has spearheaded a number of historical deals that included the first ever C-PACE financing in New York City with a $89 million loan in 2021 for 111 Wall Street. It also closed a then-record $153 million C-PACE deal in 2022 at the Black Desert luxury resort in Utah and launched a C-PACE condo lending platform last year.

McMeen said it didn’t take long after meeting with Petros’ leadership team to realize the firm was an ideal fit for his next move.

“After gaining more understanding about the opportunity for C-PACE within the real estate capital markets, I came to the conclusion that this is really an exciting space and one that’s got a lot of opportunity to grow in a meaningful way,” McMeen told CO. “There is a really strong team and foundation that Jim and Monsoor have built here.”

McKeen said Petros is strongly positioned to establish itself as a “best-in-class C-PACE lender” in terms of providing “cost-effective” financing options that achieve meaningful savings for borrowers. He said he is looking to grow Petros’ reach into the more institutional side of the CRE market to go along with many local sponsors it has worked with, and he sees opportunities for growth in senior housing, a sector largely underserved by C-PACE.

While market uncertainty with tariffs has slowed some C-PACE deals involving new construction or renovation projects due to unknowns on costs of materials, McKeen sees opportunities to capitalize once conditions stabilize.

“The key for us is to remain patient and not to rush into transactions where maybe there’s more risk than what we want to tolerate,” McKeen said. “There’s going to be change in the market, and our focus is being as best positioned to take advantage of that as we can when that does happen, and think it’ll happen before the end of the year.”

Andrew Coen can be reached at acoen@commercialobserver.com