I’ve written extensively about the CRE CLO technology for a long time and why it is the best leverage technology across securitization markets. With the sponsor typically holding up to 20% of the bottom of the capital stack, it represents the best alignment of interests between sponsor and investor. For the sponsor, it provides unique, … Continue Reading
I wrote about the disconnect between our CRE CLO technology and the task at hand (finding acceptable lever in an expanding leverage desert) in my last commentary. While the CRE CLO remains the best form of match-term, non-marked-to-market finance for portfolio lenders and represents the best alignment of interests between sponsor and investor across the … Continue Reading
CRE CLO technology is languishing in the toolbox. A combination of high interest rates, a mispriced legacy book, an anxious investor base and no real need to refresh capital until borrowers start borrowing again is largely responsible. When a tool just doesn’t work anymore, you don’t throw it away, you fix it. I like this … Continue Reading
The current administration’s legislative initiatives are largely bottled up in a split Congress, so the path toward achieving the White House’s policy priorities runs almost exclusively through the executive order and rule-making process and boy, have they worked it hard. But Santa is coming down the chimney delivering lumps of coal so often these days, … Continue Reading
If the wisdom of crowds has any validity (and there’s no real evidence that it’s any worse than the pontifical huffings of the chattering class), then there’s hope for 2023. Optimism did itself proud at CREFC. We’ll see if that optimism is recapitulated at SFVegas and at the MBA CREF meeting coming up in the … Continue Reading
It’s Golden Turkey Awards Time, Folks! Our Turkeys are a little late this year but hey, we’ve been busy worrying about the collapse of the world’s economy. This is the 10th edition of our Turkeys and much thanks to our disorderly, often dysfunctional, regularly inscrutable and absurd government, polity and marketplace for continuing to provide … Continue Reading
The conduit market does not absorb a lot of bandwidth in my day-to-day practice; I’m more of a CRE/CLO/warehouse/SASB/new products/innovation sort of guy. But it’s painful to watch this marquee capital markets product wither away, a product that transformed $200 billion of mortgage loans into securities in a single year. That biz might limp over … Continue Reading
Why don’t enough investors like CRE CLO securities? They all really should, and it would be terrifically helpful to the market if more of them did so. (Okay, terrifically helpful to me.)… Continue Reading
Just a few weeks back, I penned a sunny and optimistic piece about the growth of the CRE CLO market in 2022 and by implication, the general amicable economic conditions on which the growth of that technology would depend. Being your basic risk-adverse type, I, of course, conditioned and limited my happy talk by excluding … Continue Reading
Our fine little CRE CLO business has exploded over the past couple of years, hasn’t it? Last year, around this time, I recklessly predicted for my friends at Commercial Mortgage Alert that we might hit $30 billion of issuance in 2021. I was the outlier…by a lot. Well, it looks like we’ll finish the year … Continue Reading
Here at Dechert, we have market-leading practices in CRE CLO as well as corporate CLOs, including broadly syndicated and middle market structures. So, every day that I peer into these two alternate universes, I’m astonished at how different these two fundamentally similar leverage technologies really are. Certainly, even at a modest remove, they look pretty … Continue Reading
Let me first apologize to my readership. I have been very dilatory in getting this commentary done and this topic is… a bit daunting. In my defense, working for a living can get in the way of thinking and writing. In any event, I have been doing some considerable reading about Environmental, Social and Governance … Continue Reading
With apologies to Madeline Kahn, in this case, it indeed is twu, it’s twu! The CRE CLO technology is maturing and evolving into the stable, match term, non-recourse, non-marked to market, dynamic portfolio lender lever technology that its fans (me among them) always thought that it could be. It’s just taken some time. Tainted by … Continue Reading
In order to avoid burying the lead, let me tell you where I’m going here. The CRE securitization business is in trouble. We need to throw out what biologists call the punctuated equilibrium, where once a system initially stabilizes, it thereafter changes little and resists radical change. Elsewise, our business is at very material risk … Continue Reading
