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 […]

Daniel Indiviglio at The Atlantic just published an interesting article, “Is the Commercial Mortgage Market healing?”Frankly, it is not wholly clear that the commercial mortgage market is, or will, become better in the very near future. However, Indiviglio lays down a fairly solid argument that is more than worthy of a quick  look. For quite some time […]

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 […]

Finally, some good news. Commercial real estate markets across the U.S. continued on their trend of improvement in the second quarter 2010, according to Moody’s. The news is more than welcome, in that some upward pricing movement is always a good sign for the market, if not for the industries psyche. But the long-standing problems are […]

When banks fail, who’s getting their hands on the distressed properties taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC)?

Here is one of the pieces of the distressed market puzzle ……
Read the full WSJ article.

The Opportunity: A partnership between Colony Capital LLC and a minority-owned investment firm won the bidding for a $1.85 billion portfolio […]

We have addressed the topic of “Extend and Pretend,” with respect to banking activities relative to the current commercial real estate market. Apparently this is a topic that will be with us for quite some time. So what is the true state of the CRE market, as of today (Q3 2010):

Banks hold some $176 billion of […]