The never ending pipeline of shadow inventory – 1,800,000 homes in foreclosure while another 2,000,000 are underwater by 50 percent. No housing recovery without clearing out shadow inventory and expanding real household wages.
There will be no recovery until the shadow inventory is cleared out. This backlog of properties hangs over any sustainable housing recovery like a dark cloud […]

As an increasing number of commercial property owners face upcoming debt maturities, more of them have started to use threats of strategic default as a bargaining tool in negotiations with lenders.
Knowing how reluctant lenders are to take back assets, borrowers of every kind, from big publicly traded REITs to private players with only a handful […]

Fitch reported today the commercial real estate (CRE) values continue to decline giving rise to greater loan losses on CRE. On the average throughout 2009, lenders recovered ONLY 43 cents on the dollar on distressed loans. And there’s more bad news; they see the loss rate only going up.

The average loss severity rate or the ratio […]

Funds giving investors money back? If ever there was a red flag, and in the end a litmus test regarding the state of Commercial Real Estate (CRE), here it is. According to a just published WSJ article, Dearth of Properties Spurs Fund Giveback some real-estate funds, which raised billions of dollars hoping to pounce on […]

ALARMINGLY, today we discover that more than 1.2 million households [have been] lost to the recession, according to a report issued this week by the Mortgage Bankers Association that looked at data between 2005 and 2008.
That number doesn’t include information from 2009, when job losses and foreclosures continued to rise. So it’s likely that the […]

 In a word, the residential mortgage picture is: BAD.
As reported by MarketWatch, more than 11.3 million homeowners — nearly one-fourth of all Americans with a mortgage — owe more on their loan (or are “under water”), than their home is now worth, according to a report released February 23, 2010, by FirstAmerican CoreLogic.

More than 10% of […]

The January 2010 Moody’s CMBS delinquency rate hit a record at 5.42%, after posting the largest one month increase (50 bps) in history.
While the deplorable state of CMBS is not a secret to anyone following RealPoint’s monthly delinquency data, getting confirmation from a procyclical firm such as Moody’s should be enough to wake up some […]

We normally would NOT reproduce language from a prospectus filed with the SEC. HOWEVER the following language is culled directly from a very interesting and timely filing made by First Mariner Bank on Tuesday (2.9.10).
It is so related to our recent posts – regarding the collapse of the commercial real estate market and the heavy-weight […]

Here’s what MarylandCommercialTitle.com has been saying for more than two (2) years now. Could this truly be our reality?
Over the next several years, a watchdog group concludes that failed commercial real estate loans could litter American cities with empty stores and office complexes, cause hundreds of bank failures and weaken the economy.
Banks face up to […]

The largest real estate deal ever has failed. The question is, what’s next?
On Monday, January 25, 2010 — Tishman Speyer BlackRock, one of America’s largest commercial property owners, threw in the towel.
They sent their $5.3 billion investment in 11,000 apartments in New York back to their bankers – the same way some homeowners are mailing […]