Molly McCabe — Founder & President
Molly has spent her career at the intersection of capital markets, real estate, and the structural forces most investors are still learning to price.
Current work includes leading development of Parkline Yards — a 150,000 SF targeted net-zero, mass timber mixed-use project in Kalispell, Montana — encompassing acquisition, capital formation, construction management, environmental remediation, and tenant curation. She structured and manages Glacier Opportunity Zone Fund alongside the project — a Reg D private placement with full SPE architecture, investment memorandum, and ongoing fund management and is partnering on a GIS and AI-enabled platform to integrate physical climate risk into institutional real estate investment decisions at scale. She chairs a global bi-weekly peer group on trends and opportunities at the nexus of real estate, climate, and impact investment, and is co-founder and co-host of Breaking Ceilings | Breaking Ground — a podcast and forthcoming book, amplifying the women developers, investors and innovators who are reshaping commercial real estate, co-created with Jill Ferrari. Now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
Her capital markets career began at Wells Fargo and continued at Bank of America, where she ran the Real Estate Capital Markets group and led transactions including individual loans in the $100M range and managed several large loan ($300M-$500M) portfolio sales to major investment banks. She co-founded Bridger Commercial Funding, a VC-backed CMBS platform that scaled from $300M in originations in year one to over $1B at peak — structuring, packaging and selling commercial mortgage-backed securities into the secondary market. Advisory clients have included the U.S. Department of Energy, a Southern California-based multifamily REIT, and Pacific Northwest real estate investment and development companies. HaydenTanner has directed capital investments delivering 41% total return improvement, 55% energy savings and has negotiated asset sales at price premiums exceeding 10%.
In 2000 she founded HaydenTanner. Practical Greening — published in 2010 and reviewed by the Director of Harvard's Initiative for Responsible Investment and Head of Commercial Real Estate for PNC Bank — made the case for climate-adjusted underwriting before it was institutional practice. She is co-founder and co-host of Breaking Ceilings | Breaking Ground — a podcast and forthcoming book, co-created with Jill Ferrari, dedicated to the women developers, investors, and innovators reshaping the built environment — and has written for Institutional Real Estate Investor and AFIRE. Recent presentations include the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance, ULI Regional Resilience panels, and the Seattle AIA Climate Leadership Summit.
Molly holds an MBA from the University of San Francisco and a BA in Managerial Economics from UC Davis. She is a LEED AP, trained mediator, and certified corporate coach. She co-founded The Lotus Campaign, a national nonprofit delivering housing-driven solutions for homelessness. She serves on the boards of The FreshWater Trust, the ULI Impact Lab, Terwilliger Center for Housing, and the CityCraft Foundation, is founding member and strategic advisor to the Women's Development Collaborative, and is Past Chair of ULI's Responsible Property Investment Council.
A different way of seeing.
Every building has three lives running simultaneously. One is physical — materials, systems, exposure to weather, the vulnerability of a specific asset in a specific place under specific and changing conditions. One is market-based — tenant demand, operating costs, insurance trajectories, rent fundamentals, and the economic vitality of the submarket it sits in. And one is financial — a spreadsheet, a cap rate, a projected return that copies Year 1 assumptions out to Year 10 as if nothing will change.
For decades, the assumption that all three would remain roughly stable — that the physical would hold, the market would perform, and the financial model would prove out — made the gap between them manageable. It doesn't anymore.
The structural forces reshaping real estate markets — physical climate exposure, demographic migration, housing supply collapse, AI infrastructure demand, insurance market repricing, and the regulatory responses to all of them — are disrupting all three layers simultaneously. Most capital deployed today is working from a model that captures one, maybe two of them. The third is where the exposure lives.
The tribe, the nation, the enterprise with the most accurate maps wins.
HaydenTanner builds the maps. We identify what the data is already showing that the market hasn't priced. We find the path through the capital structure that conventional analysis missed. We connect the capital, the vision, and the people required to move from analysis to action. And we find the durable returns that live inside what everyone else is calling disruption.
Advisory. Development. Foresight. All built on the same thesis.
We look at what the market calls disruption and see the alchemical circumstance — the force that clears space for what can be. That's where the durable returns are. That's where we work.
How we work
HaydenTanner engagements are led by Molly McCabe and staffed to scope. We work with a trusted network of specialists — capital markets attorneys, climate data scientists, engineers, financial modelers, and institutional advisors — assembled around the specific needs of each engagement. The methodology is consistent. The team is built for the work.
Ready to see what your portfolio is actually exposed to?
We take a small number of engagements each quarter.