Commercial Real Estate Lurks as Next Potential

For Commercial Real Estate, Hard Times Have Just Begun

September 1, 2009

New York Times - ...These days, the people who buy and sell office buildings, shopping centers, warehouses, apartment buildings and hotels are hardly in a festive mood, despite some recent encouraging signs relating to the job and housing markets and a recent increase in sales of small office buildings.

Even though industry lobbyists were able to persuade Congress to extend a loan program aimed at prodding the stalled securitization market back to life, several analysts said it was unlikely to head off a spate of defaults, foreclosures and bankruptcies that could surpass the devastating real estate crash of the early 1990s. “It will prop up a few deals, but you can’t stop the wave that’s coming,” said Peter Hauspurg, the chief executive of Eastern Consolidated, a New York brokerage firm.

The distress is still in its early stages, analysts said. “We are between the first and second inning,” said Richard Parkus, who directs research on commercial mortgage-backed securities for Deutsche Bank. “We’re going to have to get through a very difficult period.”

Mr. Parkus said that vacancy increases and rent declines already mirrored what happened in the 1990s, and until new jobs were created, generating an increase in demand for commercial space and more retail spending, this was not likely to be reversed.

Building values have declined by as much as 50 percent around the country, and even more in Manhattan, where prices soared the highest. As many as 65 percent of commercial mortgages maturing over the next few years are unlikely to qualify for refinancing because of the drop in values and new stricter underwriting standards, he said.

Fitch Ratings recently reported that $36.1 billion in securitized loans — mortgages pooled, sliced into different categories of risk and sold to investors — have been transferred so far this year to a “special servicer,” an agency that handles troubled loans. Such a transfer is prompted by a bankruptcy, a 60-day delinquency or the prospect of an imminent default. In all, some 3,100 loans representing $49.1 billion, or 6.1 percent of the total, are currently in special servicing, an amount that could grow to nearly $100 billion by the end of the year, Fitch said.

But the damage is expected to be even greater for banks, which are holding $1.3 trillion in commercial mortgages (including apartment buildings) and $535.8 billion in construction and development loans, said Sam Chandan, the president of Real Estate Economics, a New York research company. About $393 billion worth of mortgages are scheduled to mature by the end of next year alone, and an estimated $39 billion more were due to expire this year but have been extended, he said.

By midyear, Real Capital Analytics, a New York research company, had identified $124 billion worth of distressed property. Less than 10 percent of the distress had been resolved through loan modifications or sales.

The downturn in commercial real estate is already having repercussions for local governments. New York City’s general fund, to cite an example, collected $2.1 billion from transfer and mortgage recording taxes at the peak of the market in the 2007 fiscal year, according to Frank Braconi, chief economist for the comptroller’s office. This fiscal year, it is expected to receive only $767 million, he said.

In New York, with its concentration of tall office towers, commercial mortgage-backed securities play a bigger role than they do elsewhere. The brokerage firm CB Richard Ellis estimates that about half the transactions in recent years involved securitized financing...

Commercial Real Estate Lurks as Next Potential Mortgage Crisis

August 31, 2009

Wall Street Journal - Federal Reserve and Treasury officials are scrambling to prevent the commercial-real-estate sector from delivering a roundhouse punch to the U.S. economy just as it struggles to get up off the mat.

Their efforts could be undermined by a surge in foreclosures of commercial property carrying mortgages that were packaged and sold by Wall Street as bonds. Similar mortgage-backed securities created out of home loans played a big role in undoing that sector and triggering the global economic recession. Now the $700 billion of commercial-mortgage-backed securities outstanding are being tested for the first time by a massive downturn, and the outcome so far hasn’t been pretty.

The CMBS sector is suffering two kinds of pain, which, according to credit rater Realpoint LLC, sent its delinquency rate to 3.14% in July, more than six times the level a year earlier. One is simply the result of bad underwriting. In the era of looser credit, Wall Street’s CMBS machine lent owners money on the assumption that occupancy and rents of their office buildings, hotels, stores or other commercial property would keep rising. In fact, the opposite has happened. The result is that a growing number of properties aren’t generating enough cash to make principal and interest payments...