Team Members
Jeff Donovan
Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Jeff received his BA in Finance from Arizona State University in 1990, and a Juris Doctorate from the University of San Diego School of Law in 1993. Several months after graduating law school he received a phone call from a college friend in the mortgage business looking for an investor to fund a hard money loan. Jeff agreed to invest and after that loan paid off, he made the decision to pursue a career in real estate finance. He started out working for a national mortgage bank as a loan officer, then transitioned to an independent mortgage broker, obtaining his Department of Real Estate Brokers license twenty years ago. He still brokers bank mortgage loans today; however, the primary focus of his business is custom credit private money loans secured by real estate. Jeff is also a licensed NMLS loan originator.
Christian Assouad
Born and raised in the Principality of Monaco, Christian moved to the United States in 1990. In the year 2000, he graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas with a BA in General Business and moved to Los Angeles where he began his career in the mortgage lending business. In 2002, Christian founded Preferred Lending Group (PLG), a California Department of Real Estate licensed mortgage banking and brokering company. Christian and Jeff have continuously worked together since 2003 in a partnership capacity, through their respective companies. PLG performs loan processing and funding of brokered bank residential one-to-four-unit loans where Jeff is the loan officer.
Adrian Lee
A California native, Adrian attended California Lutheran University, graduating with a BA in Chemistry. Towards the end of a thirty year career in the steel industry, he transitioned to managing his family’s real estate investments and private money trust deeds, and expanded those family investments into funding hard money loans. In 2014 Adrian began assisting MO Financial with loan servicing and client development.