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Last year, a California Bankruptcy Court wiped out $10.2 million in default interest (“DRI”) when it ruled that a 5% DRI was an unenforceable penalty in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy case where the construction lender fully recovered principal, interest, and other costs of collection. In acting as the borrower’s fairy godmother, the Court noted that the 5% DRI, an industry standard for construction loans, was unreasonable because it was not negotiated in detail at origination and because it did not adequately forecast the lender’s anticipated costs and damages. So much for considering prevailing practices when gauging reasonableness! The court’s decision also hinged on the fact that the lender was able to collect exit fees, late fees, and loan extension fees while the loan was in forbearance. In the court’s opinion, such fees already compensated the lender for the costs associated with the default.  Now that’s novel!  We sort of thought that lenders collected exit fees, late fees and loan extension fees in consideration of other things the lender did or forbore from doing.  Silly us.
Continue Reading A Survival Guide for Winning Default Rate Interest in Courtroom Battles

God help me, I’m finally writing about climate change.  This commentary assiduously avoids the obviously political (we take the view that complaining about and belittling our elected representatives and the permanent bureaucracy for doing boneheaded things is entirely apolitical).  And while even the phrase “climate change” carries with it a certain frisson of a capital “P” political debate, this is not that.  So, please, don’t ball this missive up, toss it away and cancel your subscription to Crunched Credit if you’re (A) not a fully-enrolled initiate in the Green Revolution, or indeed, even, if you are someone who thinks that the threat of climate change is somewhat… overblown (I’m not even going to think about using the term “climate denier”) or (B) someone who thinks climate change is real but simply throws your arms up in frustration over the possibility of finding a possibly affordable fix.

In either of those cases, I expect your default response to climate change talk is simply to move on to something more actionable in your professional life and I’m going to suggest here why you shouldn’t do that.  We need to start paying more attention than I have paid to date.Continue Reading Commercial Real Estate and Climate Change

After an evening checking out my various high school and college yearbooks for any troublesome content, and checking Mom’s photo albums (I’m good on the yearbooks, but there were a couple cowboy and Indian pics from when I was about 7, that could be troublesome), it got me thinking hard about the power of words, images and narratives. Words will hurt you. Images will hurt you. Narratives will hurt you.

Our industry has to pay attention to the power of words, images and narratives; and particularly right now as the 2020 election cycle gets into high gear.

High school tweets, Texas bar admission applications, and college papers apparently can now ruin careers. Now some may say that’s a good thing and some may say it’s terrible, but let’s face it, it is a thing. In this world of hyper-connectivity, words and images take flight instantaneously and can spread around the market, around a polity, a community or around the globe in a heartbeat. And they never go away. Moreover, there seems to be a view in currency that forgiveness is not possible and balance is no longer relevant and that people are defined by their worst. A sort of the lowest common denominator. Well, heaven forbid that I take sides here, but think, if you will, for a moment on Winston Churchill: Gallipoli, Edward VIII, resistance to Indian independence and certainly some racism towards the people of the Indian subcontinent, but still the savior of the West. Bad outcome? Could happen today?
Continue Reading Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, But Words Really Matter

The new Opportunity Zones program that came to us in 2017’s major tax reform offers investors the chance to roll the capital gains from the sale of any appreciated property into new investments, located within specially designated areas known as Opportunity Zones, and defer—and potentially partially eliminate— capital gains taxes on such sale. The program is similar to a 1031 Exchange, but with a socially conscious geographic focus, that applies broadly to investments across asset classes – not just to real estate. The tax benefits of the program will begin stepping down for investments made after December 31, 2019, so the clock is ticking on the chance to pull capital out of appreciated assets and invest it in a Qualified Opportunity Fund (QOF). The time is now to start thinking about where all this capital will be sitting when the music stops.
Continue Reading Opportunity Zones: Monetary Musical Chairs, Anyone?

We’re all just back from CREFC and the mood was broadly constructive.  (Don’t you love that word, “constructive”?  When did “constructive” become a fancy way to say “good”?)  We all went to South Beach this year wondering where the investors were, wondering whether the market was okay and wondering whether December was a blip or a coda. If the industry chatter captured the gestalt, and the gestalt is right, then while this recently strong market will surely expire at some point, this is not that point.

Amongst the frolicking in Goldilocks Land in SoBe, there were some actual issues discussed.  One of these that got some attention, at least by the wonkier members of the crowd, is the new risk retention rules out of Europe.

We’ve written about these before.  It is very much a moving target.  If you think the American rulemaking process is baroque, turgid and opaque, spend some time in Brussels. 
Continue Reading More Fun With Risk Retention: Europe and Japan Weigh In

We have been writing off and on about the restoration to good graces of the commercial real estate CLO since the early days of this current recovery, and it’s important to keep the conversation going.  Hey, if Pete Rose can get into the Hall of Fame (and as MLB is embracing gambling, that cannot but happen, right?), the full restoration of the reputation of the CRE CLO cannot be far behind.

First, let’s just stop and get some definitional clarity here for those of you who actually have a life.  Fundamentally, the CRE CLO is a device that provides match-term leverage for a portfolio lender, though the technology can be used for other purposes.  Loans are pooled, investment-grade securities are sold to investors, and the loans are repaid from debt service payments.  Customarily, the sponsor retains all of the equity and junior debt, creating structural leverage to enhance returns on the dollars invested in the structure.

It’s really a warehouse funded by the capital markets. As such, it provides for an excellent alignment of interests between investors and the sponsor, who holds the bottom of the capital stack.  The sponsor is in it for the long haul, managing financial assets for its benefit and the benefit of the investors alike.
Continue Reading The CRE CLO Is Back…and That’s Good

It’s that time again for Dechert’s CrunchedCredit Annual Golden Turkey Awards. In a year made most remarkable by the extraordinary performance of the US economy, idiocy, silliness, pigheadedness and stupidity have tended to be somewhat obscured by the economic good news machine. At the other end of the spectrum, the continued high volume of outrage over almost everything from both the left and right (and I’m sure the middle would do their fair share here if there was anyone at home) makes it harder to suss out the truly memorable and award-winning, but it’s our job to try. As we have said in the past, this would be really hard if the world actually behaved in a predictable, rational, Newtonian universe sort of way, but blessedly it does not.Continue Reading 2018 Golden Turkey Awards

In February, the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled in The Loan Syndications and Trading Association v. Securities and Exchange Commission and Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, No. 17-5004 (D.C. Cir. Feb. 9, 2018) (the “LSTA decision”) that a manager of an open market CLO is not required to retain risk under the Dodd-Frank Act and Regulation RR, because only a securitizer which transfers financial assets into a securitization vehicle must retain risk.  No transfer, no risk retention.

In its decision (joined by Judge Brett Kavanaugh), the Court was very clear in its analysis.  Essentially, the decision said “thank you very much, we can read simple English sentences, and the law is crystal clear on this point (if not on much else).”  The regulators may not elide the transfer requirement of the Dodd-Frank Act by calling managers of open market CLOs securitization sponsors, when they don’t transfer assets to a securitization vehicle.  The Court went on to point out that if this was a loophole, it needed to be fixed by Congress, not the regulators.  Blessedly, a satisfying, albeit rare, victory for a plain reading of our mother tongue.  The regulations actually mean what they say!

The broadly syndicated CLO business has taken this ruling to heart and has been beavering away on transaction structures that no longer provide for the retention of credit risk. One big issue in that space now is whether you can square the circle about avoiding risk retention in the US, while somehow meeting the EU risk retention criteria.  But that’s a bit of legerdemain for discussion another day.  What I want to talk about is the utility of the LSTA decision in spaces other than the broadly syndicated CLO space—particularly for commercial real estate single-asset, single-borrower (SASB) securitizations, a product representing almost half of all CRE securitization offerings this year.
Continue Reading The Boundaries of Risk Retention Now That the D.C. Circuit Has Spoken

In 2013, the Obama administration issued the Cole Memorandum, which called a truce between federal prosecutors and marijuana businesses operating legitimately under state law.  After regime change in Washington, however, it may come as no surprise that Jeff Sessions—the Attorney General who once opined that “good people don’t smoke marijuana”—rescinded the Obama-era guidance.  The only real surprise is that it took him a whole year to do it.

Since at least 2013, marijuana-related businesses have generally been operating on predictable, albeit legally shaky, ground.  Dispensaries have expanded dramatically.  Though details vary wildly, nine states currently allow recreational use and medicinal use is currently permitted under the laws of all but four states.

As a result, commercial real estate lenders have to grapple with the increasingly common problem of the dispensary tenant, and a number of lenders are dipping their toes into lending in expectation of securitizing loans secured in part by dispensaries.  But given the January 2018 announcement that the Cole memo is no longer in effect, the question everyone’s asking is: are things really that different?  The answer, we think, is no—but with an asterisk.
Continue Reading Securitizing Marijuana Dispensary Properties in the Sessions Era