Robert F. (Bob) Baer

Robert F. (Bob) Baer is Managing Partner of OSO Holdings LLC and brings more than 45 years of Latin American capital markets, real estate, and conservation finance experience to The Ocean Foundation, having raised and deployed over $3 billion in capital across the region. His career spans debt-for-equity conversions at Bankers Trust during the Brady Bond era; a founding role at Sam Zell’s Equity International Properties, where he was the lead private-sector contact to the Mexican government commission that drafted the country’s FIBRA (REIT) legislation; a tenure as Managing Director for Latin American real estate at AIG Global Real Estate; and the building of the $640 million Lion Mexico Fund, the largest dedicated Mexico real estate fund of its era. Decades of coastal resort development gave Bob firsthand knowledge of the mangroves, estuaries, and beaches that now anchor his conservation work. Since 2020 he has served as Conservation Finance Advisor to The Ocean Foundation, architecting coastal transactions that pair conservation easements with foundation and family-office capital across Mexico, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and Belize. As a Senior Fellow, Bob works with The Ocean Foundation on regenerative resort projects and their financing—integrating habitat restoration and long-term stewardship into coastal real estate, and building toward the scale needed to issue dedicated green and blue bonds for coastal restoration in Latin America. He holds a B.A. from Lafayette College and is pursuing a certificate through the Yale School of the Environment’s Environmental Leadership and Training Initiative. He is fluent in Spanish.