The Most Powerful Women to Watch, No. 14, Kara McShane, Wells Fargo

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Kara McShane, managing director and head of commercial real estate (CRE) at Wells Fargo, leads with a hands-on approach and builds teams that are ready to roll up their sleeves.

Through leading by example, she has created a culture where she expects people to work "side-by-side", and through which CRE has grown to be a powerhouse inside Wells Fargo's corporate and investment bank.

That growth has netted out over a rash of deals, including a $10 billion take-private of real estate investment trust AIR Communities for Blackstone in June 2024, a deal McShane said was emblematic of the agile, collaborative approach she wants to drive.

McShane remembers receiving the call about the deal on a weekend, where her team quickly put together a $4 billion financing package. That ultimately led to an additional bridge to a commercial mortgage backed security (CMBS) take out, as well as a balance sheet option. It was a structure that broke new ground in the market, she said.

"It ended up being the largest multi-family securitization of all time in the CMBS market and the first single-asset, single-borrower deal to ever be upsized in the market," she said. "Adding in additional collateral after the start of the marketing is a first."

That was just one of the things that contributed to Wells Fargo's corporate and investment bank generating $19.3 billion in revenue in 2024. McShane's division contributed $5.1 billion, roughly 26% of the total, the company said. In the first quarter of 2025, CRE earnings were $1.45 billion, up 18% from a year earlier.

Since taking the helm of CRE, McShane has thrived in leadership under particularly adverse conditions. After a decade at the bank, she took over just before COVID hit in February 2020, a step up that meant her remit vastly broadened in terms of the numbers of people reporting to her. Amid real estate chaos for sectors such as hotels and bricks and mortar retail, if her strategy was going to result in the growth she wanted, McShane knew that the unit would have to work in a way it hadn't before.

[The pandemic] posed challenges that no one in the sector had ever lived through. So we didn't have prior experience to pull from or prior cycles to pull from," she said. "I was trying to pull the various groups that sat under me together, trying to drive that collaboration as a new leader."

"Once I was able to get our team to operate as one, blur the lines a little bit and align incentives and reward the behavior I was looking to encourage, we were really able to fire on all cylinders," she said. She noted that CRE had also diversified its focus, broadening out from net income to fee income in search of revenue.

Today, conditions in the market are still a challenge, with high interest rates and uncertainty about office space and the overall commercial real estate industry. So despite coups like the AIR Communities deal, there's still work to do in consolidating the bank's position. McShane also points to competitive debt markets as an ongoing headwind.

"There are fewer deals today which is hard, and why relationships are incredibly important in CRE," she said. "We're being really diligent and careful in terms of underwriting and sticking to the fundamentals."