Sara Pietka
Managing Director, Rural & Infrastructure Lending, X-Caliber Rural Capital
Irvington, NY
As Managing Director, Ms. Pietka is responsible for originating, underwriting, and deploying X-Caliber Rural Capital’s conventional and USDA OneRD Guaranteed Loan products. She also supports the group’s advisory work.
Ms. Pietka has a deep background in underwriting, financial modeling and analysis, strategic planning, new product and service development, partner outreach, assembling capital stacks, and managing compliance for government-adjacent funding programs.
She has extensive experience in the New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) program and has closed more than $300 million in allocation. In her past senior management roles, she has structured a wide scope of transactions with innovative approaches incorporating and/or accommodating special purpose entities, leases, easements, and diverse sources of leverage like tax credit equity, Foundation Program-Related Investment Loans, recoverable grants, guaranteed loans, tax-exempt bonds, public-private partnerships, and collateral constraints.
Prior to joining X-Caliber, Ms. Pietka was Vice President of Community Investments at Ecotrust where she managed all aspects of deal sourcing, allocation deployment, portfolio management, compliance, impact reporting, and unwinds of the NMTC portfolio. She managed all innovative deal structuring as well as the complete life cycle of all NMTC transactions. She also led the annual NMTC application effort from the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund.
Prior to Ecotrust, she was the President of Roeder & Company where she underwrote and structured NMTC transactions for businesses and organizations that involved a diverse range of financial products including bonds, lines of credit, mortgages, developer equity, bridge loans, Small Nonprofit Accelerated Program (SNAP) bonds, USDA guaranteed loan products, historic tax credits (HTCs). Before that, she was Senior Manager of Corporate Finance at Holiday Retirement and an Investment Banking Analyst in the Real Estate Group for Credit Suisse.
Ms. Pietka holds a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Washington and a bachelor’s degree in business and technology with a minor in economics from Stevens Institute of Technology.
