Garrison Investment Group

Garrison relies on a relationship-driven origination network built over Steven Stuart and Joseph Tansey's combined decades in specialty finance. The firm targets middle-market borrowers—typically companies with $10 million to $50 million in EBITDA—that fall outside the standardized underwriting boxes of regulated banks. Deal flow comes from regional brokers, restructuring advisors, bankruptcy attorneys, and direct borrower relationships maintained by the senior team.

Garrison functions primarily as a private credit and opportunistic real estate manager, not a traditional buyout firm. The firm invests across the capital structure—first-lien loans, mezzanine debt, preferred equity, and occasionally common equity in real estate—but the dominant posture is credit, not control. The team's Fortress lineage means distressed and special-situation investing is core to how every position is framed.

Garrison has historically targeted multifamily, hospitality, and retail properties in major US markets including New York, Florida, and Texas. The firm gravitates toward situations where existing debt is mispriced or where operators need rescue capital. It has consistently avoided development-stage exposure and ground-up construction, preferring existing income-producing assets with broken capital structures that can be restructured at a discount to replacement cost.

Garrison's middle-market focus places its typical commitment in the $25 million to $75 million range per transaction, though the firm can write larger checks when partnering with co-investors. The loan-size discipline reflects a deliberate strategy: competing at this scale means avoiding the broadly syndicated loan market where pricing is commoditized, while still deploying enough capital to be the anchor lender in negotiated, one-off structures.

Garrison is a spinout, not a subsidiary. Steven Stuart, Joseph Tansey, and several founding partners left Fortress's credit business in 2007 to launch the firm independently, taking Fortress's structured-credit and real-estate-underwriting discipline with them. The two firms have no ongoing ownership link, though the overlapping origination style—heavily legal, collateral-focused, and complexity-tolerant—remains visible across both platforms.

Garrison has historically operated through closed-end drawdown funds with finite lives, not perpetual capital vehicles. The firm's inaugural 2007 fund and its 2015 follow-on credit vehicle both followed traditional blind-pool commitment structures with capital-return deadlines. This architecture forces a terminal-value discipline on every position—each deal must work within a fund life, which differentiates Garrison from evergreen credit platforms that can paper over weak exits with new subscriptions.

Investment decisions are made through a credit committee led by co-founders Steven Stuart (CEO) and Joseph Tansey (Senior Managing Director), alongside senior partners Bruce Betz and Matthew West. The committee structure reflects the firm's Fortress heritage—underwriting is highly legal and covenant-intensive, and no single individual holds unilateral approval authority on commitments above a modest materiality threshold (per the firm's official communications).