Peter Pays Paul

Page C1 of today’s Wall Street Journal is reporting that Blackstone Group, LP and CIM Group are attempting to acquire commercial real estate assets by buying the mortgages for a steep discount.

Private-equity firm CIM Group has teamed up with New York developer Harry Macklowe to help him regain control of what is regarded as one of the most valuable vacant lots in the world, according to people familiar with the matter.

This strategy is being used in a number of transactions. The success of this strategy depends upon the lenders willingness to take a loss on the property. Lenders that are in need of cash or understand that they are underwater on a property are more likely to take a discount.

In the case of the Drake Hotel site, a vacant piece of land doesn’t offer a lender much to work with. When Mr. Macklowe bought the lot it had a hotel on it which is more marketable. A lender is likely going to avoid a situation where they have to develop a piece of land.

The WSJ article also quotes Keith Barket from Angelo, Gordon & Co., a private-equity firm. Mr. Barket believes that the deleveraging of commercial real estate will take 3-5 years to complete.

It will be interesting to see if it does.

Commercial mortage brokers get paid based on the value they bring to the client in a transaction. The truly successful brokers bring value to their clients consistently.

2009 forebodes to be a difficult year for certain commercial real estate sectors. Much in the residential real estate industry has changed since 2006, we can expect similar changes in the commercial real estate. They key is to be one of the survivors that come out on the other side.

Adding Value

Most borrowers would not pay a broker’s fee if they did not get something in return for it. A commercial mortgage broker must provide something  the client “needs”.

The client may “need” a smoother transaction, a greater selection of lenders, a higher LTV, a lower rate, or more flexible loan covenants. In exchange for this the broker receives their loan fee.

All of these were solutions to problems that a broker could provide that might not have come through direct contact with an institutional lender

In the current market brokers are having more difficulty providing these items of value. LTVs have decreased, rates have gone up, and many banks are only lending to existing customers.

How does a broker survive and add value in this market?

Bring Equity

A broker that was able to provide an equity injection to a property that needs refinancing will have no shortage of business. Borrowers that cannot qualify for a refinance with new, lower values may be open to a fresh equity injection to facilitate the refinance and ownership of their property.

Offering this as a solution to a borrower’s problems will make it more palatable. Many borrowers may balk at this idea at first.

However, if the only alternative is foreclosure, this idea is likely to become less offensive.

Finding Equity

This will require some work on your part as the broker. Finding reliable and reasonable sources of equity capital. The equity investor must have the funds available to respond quickly. They also must not be so greedy as to kill a deal and offend your borrower.

One way to do this is call your existing database to see if they know anyone that might be willing to invest in projects for an equity position. Some of your existing clients may have extra cash that they would be willing to invest in the right project.

The deal structure will need to be worked out between your equity investor and the borrower.

Commercial mortgage brokers need to continue to add value to their clients’ transactions in this difficult financing environment. How do you plan to do this for 2009?

Photo credit: somethingstartedcrazy

Very few independent commercial mortgage brokers take the time to interview the lenders on their lenders list. Here are three reasons you should interview your commercial lending sources.

1) It Saves Time.

Commercial brokers will see a variety of deals come across their desk. Instead of calling 100 lenders to find out if they finance retail properties when the deal arrives, a broker can call the 10 lenders that are looking for retail properties to finance. It also allows you to collect the necessary information to accurately present the deal to the commercial lender.

It also saves the lender’s time. You do not end up calling them every five days with a deal that cannot be financed by their institution.

2) It Increases Perceived Professionalism.

We all want to be taken seriously and perceived as professionals in our field. You can appear more professional by consistently calling a lender with deals that are appealing to that lending institution.

A husband knows that his wife likes daisies, is going to score more points for bringing home daisies than petunias. Showing apartment loans to a lender that likes apartment loans, demonstrates that you listened to the lender and are serious about getting deals done with them.

3) It Increases Successful Closes.

Fewer wasted phone calls and a focused plan of attack allow you to devote more time to deal producing activities.

As lenders begin to trust you with the deals that you bring to them, they look forward to working with a person they know and trust. Marginal deals are more likely to get funded if the lender has a relationship with you.

This process also allows you to filter out the deals that you can’t readily place with any lender. This will save you from wasting precious days chasing a deal that is not able to be financed.

I hope you enjoyed my two cents on why you should develop a relationship with your commercial lender. Can you think of other reasons to develop a relationship of this type?

San Francisco Bay Area Commercial Real Estate Networking Events

As an aid to my San Francisco Bay Area readers I wanted to compile a resource of local events for commercial real estate brokers and agents, commercial mortgage brokers and bankers, and those interested in commercial real estate.

This not a comprehensive calendar but is a compilation from a variety of sources.

Organization Key

• 680 CIX – 680 Commercial Idea eXchange
• BAMA – Bay Area Mortgage Association
• BOMA – Building Owners and Managers Association
• CCIM – Certified Commercial Investment Member
• CREW – Commercial Real Estate Women
• ICSC – International Council of Shopping Centers
• IMF – Investment Marketing Forum
• IREM – Institute of Real Estate Management
• NAIOP – National Association of Industrial and Office Properties
• ULI – Urban Land Institute

EB = East Bay
SF = San Francisco
SV = Silicon Valley

NAIOP publishes a monthly trade organization calendar here: http://www.naiopsfba.org/pdf/MonthlyCalendar.pdf.

Commercial mortgage brokers would do well to take 15 minutes to get acquainted with the lenders on their lender list. While a rate sheet and lending matrix can be helpful, nothing beats a phone or face-to-face interview.

Here are nine questions that will allow a commercial broker to focus their efforts and to target properties to the right lenders.

1. What are your minimum and maximum loan amounts? - Calling a lender with a deal that is either too big or too small is a waste of your time and theirs.
2. Do you have a geographical limitation? – Some lenders can only lend in certain metropolitan areas. A loan outside of these areas is an automatic “No”.
3. What property types do you prefer? – You don’t want to take a loan on an auto body shop to a company that only finances apartments.
4. How long does your average loan take to close? What is the shortest amount of time you have personally seen a deal close? – This is very important to ask if you are dealing with 1031 exchange properties. It can help you weed out lenders for deals that need to close quickly.
5. What is your maximum loan-to-value ratio? – This helps you to eliminate lenders that cannot provide the leverage your borrower needs.
6. What is your minimum debt-service coverage ratio? – Along with the question above this helps you to determine the amount your client can borrow based on the properties income.
7. What information do you require from the borrower in a loan package? – It is frustrating for a lender to receive a trickle of information about a loan over a period of days, weeks, or months. Knowing beforehand what a lender needs, you can  assembled all the necessary documents before you send it to the lender for review and hopefully a quick answer or LOI.
8. What is the best way to contact you if I have a deal? – Contacting the lender through their preferred method shows a deference to working on the lender’s terms. It shows that you want to make things easy for them, not yourself.
9. What loans are you the most competitive on? – Sometimes lenders will tell you that they will lend on a certain type of property, and they probably will. However, the rate, LTV, or DSCR will make it practically impossible to get a loan from them. This question helps to narrow the scope to only the properties they can offer competitive financing for.

These are my nine suggested questions to ask your commercial lender. Do you have any others that you would recommend?

This month’s meeting for the Bay Area Mortgage Association was titled “What get’s financed in 2009?” The three panelists shared what each of their companies would be looking to finance in 2009.

Two life insurance companies and one national bank were represented on the panel. All three institutions expected higher cap rates, lower loan-to-value ratios, and stronger debt-service coverage ratios as requirements for new originations.

The bank is currently only planning to work with customers that have an existing banking relationship.

The life insurance companies face a difficulty because their global portfolio allocation have been skewed by the massive decline in the stock portion of their portfolios. For some of the life companies their portfolio is out of balance towards commercial real estate, as these assets have not lost value at the same rate the stocks have. This means that they will likely see a decrease in the amount of loans they can originate.

Survey Says

In a survey performed by Marcus & Millichap commercial financing ranked as the biggest concern for real estate investors in 2009 reported by Mortgage Bankers Association.

Financing availability, creditworthiness of tenants and rising vacancy rates top concerns for commercial real estate investors responding to a survey conducted by Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investments, Encino, Calif.

…

Nearly 60 percent expected all-in mortgage rates to increase in the next year; nearly 75 percent believe financing will be as difficult or more difficult to obtain. While 60 percent of commercial real estate investors expected full recovery of the commercial mortgage-backed securities market, they said its return could take at least two years.

This provides a good opportunity for:

1. Commercial mortgage brokers and bankers that are able to find solutions for their clients,
2. Commercial real estate agents that are able to structure deals that get financed,
3. Real estate investors/lenders that have cash.

Creativity will be one of the keys to success in 2009 for those in commercial real estate. “Business as usual” is on vacation.

Photo Credit: The Pack

Residential real estate had a tremendous run up in value and is severely overbuilt due to the easy access to consumer credit.

Commercial real estate, unlike previous downturns, did not commit the same error of overbuilding for the most part.

However, the macroeconomic factors of a stock market crash, tightened credit market, and a lack of consumer spending negatively impact commercial real estate.

According to CoStar Group’s article This Year, Pain To Replace Gain , 2009 will see a contraction in the demand for office and retail space.

CoStar’s CEO Andrew Florance presented a 2009 State of the Office Market review and reported that as many as 1,200 properties were either delinquent or past maturity. (Past maturity loans are not necessarily a bad thing. While the loans are in technical default, many lenders are happy to accept monthly payments while the borrower seeks to refinance the loan.)

Florance has one of the most poignant quotes from anyone in the midst of the wave of bailouts.

“The market needs to establish a new bottom before a recovery can take hold,” Florance cautioned. “The sooner we reach it, the better off we’ll be. If property values need to fall to X, it’s better to get there in 18 months not five years.”

This quote is filled with wisdom. Artificially inflating real estate values through bailout money or other funds will only prolong the downward movement. A hands off approach would allow the market to reach bottom sooner. We may feel the pinch now, but a prolonged painful slide would be avoided.

The Wall Street Journal reports in Dirt Lawyer is not impressed by this massive number (sic).

An unusually high number of the underlying CMBS loans that are going bad were made and securitized in the past three years. That is a sign that investors overpaid greatly for those properties and that underwriting standards were loose. In many cases banks lent money based on future income assumptions rather than current cash flows, experts say.

Only time will tell how good/bad 2009 will be. The sooner we reach the bottom the better for all involved in commercial real estate.

Photo credit: AdobeMac

Bloomberg.com published an article yesterday about the decline of MetLife stock and linked it to the potential for commercial mortgages to fail. However, either the stock purchasers are unable to do simple algebra or the reporter linked the decline to something incidental.

MetLife Drops as Commercial Mortgage Defaults Loom

MetLife Inc. and Prudential Financial Inc., the largest U.S. life insurers, declined in New York trading on concern that losses on commercial mortgages will surge as the recession deepens.

No. 1 MetLife dropped $4.53, or 12 percent, to $32.88 at 4:02 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading….

MetLife’s commercial mortgage portfolio totals about $36 billion and accounts for about 12 percent of invested assets….

The portfolio’s average loan-to-value ratio is 57 percent, and as of Sept. 30 less than $2 million of the loans were delinquent, Kandarian said.

MetLife Drops as Commercial Mortgage Defaults Loom.

Notice the following items:

1. MetLife’s stock fell 12% and the total value of MetLife’s commercial mortgage portfolio is about 12% of invested assets. Mathematically this means that MetLife investors must have thought that the entire commercial mortgage portfolio was going to fail in order to generate this type of fall.
2. The average loan-to-value ratio is 57%. Meaning that on average each property would have to lose about 43% of value before MetLife would lose money. Possible? Yes. Likely? No.
3. Currently, $2 million of $36 billion (yes with a ‘B’) in commercial loans were delinquent. That is less than 1/100th of 1%. Even if this number tripled it would only equal a 0.0167% delinquency rate. Multiply this by 12% and you have the true impact on the MetLife portfolio caused by commercial mortgages.

If the stock price truly fell because of the expected defaults on commercial mortgages, this is not based on the mathematical fundamentals. Any fall in stock price would be due to irrationality in the market. Market foolishness.

However, it could be that the market is not foolish and that MetLife did fall in value for a legitimate reason. However, this reason is not related to any expected delinquencies in commercial mortgages. Then we have an improperly linked cause and effect. Foolish reporting.

Last week I spent 5 days 8 hours a day in the CCIM 101 course. It was quite an investment of time (and money).

It was worth every penny and minute.

The CCIM course is not for those that are mathematically challenged. (If you hate math, this course will be a challenge.) Much of the course is theoretical and analytical. It is also entirely practical.

The theory and analysis apply to real world situations.

What does CCIM 101 cover?

In the course we reviewed discounting and compounding cash flows, net present value, amortization, and a number of other financial calculations. You will become very familiar with your calculator during the week. (CCIM recommends the HP 10bII Financial Calculator and provides many of the keystrokes in the class text.)

The course briefly covers time value of money, appraisal, taxation, and provides two case studies to bring the calculations and theories to real world scenarios.

You will learn the difference between cap rates, cash on cash returns, internal rates of return (IRR), and capital accumulation and how to calculate each one.

Who should take CCIM 101?

I would recommend this course to commercial real estate professionals that want to provide an advisory service to their clients.

This course can add tremendous value to your clients. It will help you to competently evaluate competing investments and financing scenarios. Then you can advise your client on which is a best fit for their stated investment goals.

This is a great course for leasing agents, sales agents, commercial mortgage brokers, and real estate investors.

What did I take away?

I value CCIM 101 because it is not only, useful now as a hard money lender, but I can use it in my own real estate investments.

I will most likely use this in the short term for discounted note purchases. The discounting calculations will allow me to provide an adequate return on any notes that we buy as a result of the credit crisis.

The instructors were great. They came from different locals in North America and brought a breadth of backgrounds. They were able to convey the material with authority and wisdom that only comes from years of experience.

With so much negativity in the news there is a bright spot and an opportunity for commercial real estate brokers and lenders to market to doctors. This niche seems to still be buying.

While office building transactions have fallen off a cliff in recent months, one bright spot many industry analysts point to is the medical office building market, where sales typically range from $10 million to $30 million. According to the latest data from Real Capital Analytics, sales of medical office properties totaled $3.3 billion in the first nine months of 2008, a 13% drop compared with the same period a year earlier. But that dip pales in comparison to the 62% dive in property sales for the entire office market in the third quarter.

Medical Office Sector Bucks The Cycle.