CRE CLO

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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 bad things that might proceed from disease, dictators and the Fed.

While I’m sticking by my predictions, my carve-outs seemed both more than a tad fainthearted and capacious enough to eat the proposition.…The Green Bay Packers will win the Super Bowl (by the way they will), assuming they get to the game and score more points than the other team.  Not really helpful, is it?Continue Reading Prognosticators’ Regret

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 closer to $45 billion and it’s clear that in the first quarter of 2022 we will be on fire.  Now, of course, I also thought that we’d have a fantastic year in early 2020 and then that pesky little bug changed our lives, so please consider my on-fire prediction subject to caveats, limitations and restrictions including, but not limited to, disease, dictators and the possibility that the Fed is making a colossal mistake.

All else being equal, the CRE CLO business will continue to grow and I don’t really see the appetite for this technology receding any time soon.  Could it?  Sure.  Annoying black swans aside, if the curve radically changes shape and creates outsized demand for fixed rate product, the CRE CLO business, as it has grown up in the past couple of years, will see challenges.  But more on this later.Continue Reading The CRE CLO Unleashed

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 much the same.  A sponsor is looking for match term leverage and has developed a healthy disquietude about the mark to marketness of the repo market and has read CrunchedCredit assiduously and understands that portfolio lenders need multiple modalities of leverage.  Said well-educated sponsor conveys financial assets into a securitization vehicle which issues time and ratings tranched debt to a wide range of investors seeking exposure to the space in a more liquid and more focused risk/yield return way.  Tada!
Continue Reading A Modest Proposal: Why Can’t CRE CLOs Be More Like Corporate CLOs?

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 (ESG) issues recently. It had not really been on my screen, in a big way, but has been bubbling along as a thing, important to some, but not so much for us denizens of the commercial real estate finance space.
Continue Reading We All Need Practice Spelling ESG

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 the wildly different, and in hindsight entirely zany, CRE CDO securitization from before the Great Recession (most, but not all, of which died ingloriously before that recession was over) and after having creeped back into usage in the marketplace between 2012 and 2016, the CRE CLO as a technology to securitize whole mortgage loans is finally maturing into a stable and useful tool in the toolbox of the portfolio lender. Growing from a handful of deals in the period 2012 through 2016, total CRE CLO production was around $15 billion; in 2017 it was $7.7 billion; in 2018 it was $14 billion; and in 2019 it would appear to be on track to perhaps be a $20 billion securitization market. Ignoring for the moment black swans, orange swans, dictators, Brexiteers and sundry other loons on a mission to derail our economy or the modern world writ large, the CRE CLO market sector should continue to grow at a respectable pace with only the obligatory brief respite shared by all structured products, during the next recession, whenever it might occur.
Continue Reading Like Bonds, But Not Bankers, the CRE CLO is Maturing

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 of irrelevance.

But to give you some time to mull all that over, let me set the table first.  I’ve been worried…Continue Reading It’s Time to Fix Securitization: Are We Dinosaurs Staring Into the Tar Pit?