Unstructured Finance

Wall Street is shrinking, but so are some of its bankers.

Eight years ago, Goldman Sachs Group’s Kishan Shah weighed 400 pounds and couldn’t find a suit that fit his 62” waist for a job interview. Now he’s 195 pounds, and he’s quitting Goldman to spread the gospel of healthy weight loss as chief executive of a chain of gyms for obese Americans.

“I made a vow that day to focus on diet and exercise, and I lost over 200 pounds – no surgeries, no fad diets, no trainers,” Shah said in a video chat this month with First Lady Michelle Obama.

Shah, who is 26 and works as an analyst in the Special Situations Group at Goldman Sachs, may not be representative of the typical bank employee who’s leaving.

Fearing that three will be fewer opportunities at banks in the future, many young workers are heading to hedge funds and private-equity firms, or else to the tech industry, where startups are itching to hire Wall Street ex-pats who can help manage their finances and operations. Senior bankers are heading to greener pastures, too. Just this week came news that two twin Goldman partners named Paul and Peter Scialla are quitting to run a home-design firm.

Shah will be taking on a leadership role at Downsize Fitness, a gym whose members must be at least 50 pounds overweight. Downsize now has two locations, in Dallas and Chicago, and is looking to expand, Shah said.

By Matthew Goldstein and Jennifer Ablan

All year the big money has been talking up one of the more intriguing trades to emerge from the housing crisis: buying up foreclosed homes in large scale and rent those out for several years and then unload them when the price is right. But questions about the so-called rent-to-own trade are being raised now that an early mover in the space, hedge fund giant Och-Ziff Capital, is looking to cash in its chips now and is abandoning the idea of operating foreclosed homes as rental properties for years to come.

Now we’re not quite ready to declare the foreclosed home rent-to-own trade is dead as the tireless, prolific financial bloggers at ZeroHedge did in a good riff on our exclusive story on Och-Ziff’s decision. But Daniel Och’s concern that the income to be generated from renting out foreclosed homes may not be as high as originally anticipated bears close scrutiny because it could spell trouble for other hedge funds, private equity firms and smaller money managers counting on rental income to generate an annual 8 pct or greater return on investment.

Way back in March, when we first wrote about all the big money that was racing into the foreclosed home market, we noted that some were concerned that a lot of the newer entrants might not really up to the challenge of managing and renting single-family homes for the long haul. Historically, the business of buying, rehabbing and renting foreclosed homes has been a mom-and-pop endeavor, conducted by people with strong community roots. The skeptics wondered whether institutional players were too blinded by the potential to capture yield and overlooking the challenges that comes with bringing often vacant foreclosed homes up  to code and habitable conditions.