Fear of Regulation G. M. Filisko – Nattional Real Estate Investor – Apr 1, 2008 The drumbeat for reform in the residential mortgage market due to lax underwriting standards has been growing in recent months, but there has been virtually no push for regulation of commercial mortgage lenders. Why? Industry experts say that the size and complexity of commercial real estate deals requires a high degree of transparency that generally precludes the kind of abuses that have surfaced in the residential sector. Besides, experts add, regulations today won’t do much […]

STILL THE ONE APARTMENT FINANCE TODAY • MARCH 2008 Portfolio lenders, once the standard in multifamily lending, are now helping to fill the void left by a dormant CMBS market. By Jerry Ascierto Multifamily developers are getting reacquainted with an old friend in 2008. Before the emergence of conduit lenders, institutional lenders like life insurance companies and pension funds dominated the multifamily debt industry. These portfolio lenders use their balance sheets to make loans and hold onto them, in contrast to conduit lenders, which bundle mortgages and sell them as […]

MULTI-HOUSING NEWS REPORTS ON HOUSING STATISTICS April Market Pulse Published: April 01, 2008 Apartment Starts: Multifamily (5+ units) starts surged by 15 percent in February from the previous month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 331,000 and were 23 percent above the same period one year earlier. (These date include both for-sale and for-rent housing starts.) Actual (not seasonally adjusted) starts totaled 43,000 through the first two months of the year, up 19 percent from one year earlier. Rent Changes: The year-over-year change in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) […]

MBA ECONOMIST PREDICTS COMMERCIAL LOAN RATES At the recent Mortgage Bankers Association meetings in Orlando, Florida Douglas Duncan, chief economist of MBA predicted that the spreads quoted by commercial mortgage lenders on commercial mortgages would remain at about their current level of 190 to 200 basis points through the end of 2008. (190 basis points equals 1.9% and is generally added to the current 10 year treasury bond yield which was 3.57% on April 3, 2008). He noted that the spreads were about 135 basis points in the early 1990’s […]