On February 10, 2010 the Congressional Oversight Panel issued a most amazing and eye-opening report entitled: Commercial Real Estate Losses and the Risk to Financial Stability.
Here a quick executive summary — directly from the source – that should be read very carefully. Keep in mind, this is what the government’s oversight panel is concluding; not […]

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 […]

The WSJ just posted a Blog entry today regarding the commercial real-estate sector, The Most Toxic Loans in Commercial Real Estate. The gist of the discussion addresses the pressing reality that not all commercial real-estate loans are created equal.

In Wednesday’s Journal they reported that U.S. banks have been “slow” to take losses on battered commercial […]

A year after Washington rescued the big names of American finance; believe it or not, in spite of the billions committed and the alphabet soup of newly created stimulus programs, it’s still hard to get a loan.

But the problem isn’t just tight-fisted banks, according to the WSJ article, Paralysis in the Debt Markets Is […]

The commercial real estate loan market is facing two nasty headwinds.
The first one, which is more visible, is the maturity wall of commercial mortgages (many of which have been securitized via CMBS). Concentrated maturities with balloon type principal payments will make it that much more difficult to refinance these loans.
The second issue is the rise […]

As reported in www.ZeroHedge.com, the FDIC keeps auctioning off its busted CRE loan portfolio; most of it remnants collected from failed banks which it had to pick up.
With the recent mega additions of Colonial and Guaranty, look for this list to explode. In the meantime, in June 2009, Sheila’s agency saw only 45 CRE loans […]

Today’s release of the S&P/Case-Shiller home price indices for May 2009 showed the first month-to-month gain in 34 months (almost 3 years!).
Clearly this is a notable development but it’s important to put today’s results in perspective before getting to confident that even the initial leg of the declining trend has ceased.

First, it’s important to recognize […]