Beany & Cecil was a cartoon. The Current Expected Credit Loss accounting rules, better known as CECL, which the FASB is insisting will go into effect at the beginning of next year for publicly traded banks and lenders and a year later for all other GAAP reporting entities is not. Now, heaven forfend that I suggest that the work of the Financial Accounting Standards Board is cartoonish, but there’s a parallel in this pairing of harmless and obscured menace worth noting.
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Opportunity Zones: Monetary Musical Chairs, Anyone?
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.
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Risk Retention and the CRE CLO
As we are just inking one of the very first pre-risk retention effective date risk retention deals (Potemkin Village anyone?), we are also seeing an increased flow of what are generically referred to as CRE CLOs. It’s time to consider how the Risk Retention Rule (the “Rule”) will apply to this growing market technology.
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Zika Keeps Investors Away From ABS East, But Not From CLOs
Although registration was up this year for IMN’s 22nd Annual ABS East conference held at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach earlier this month, attendance was lower than it’s been in previous years as many industry participants decided against attending due to concerns about the recent Zika outbreak in Miami. The CLO sector, however, continued to be well represented and the consensus of the conference attendees was that CLOs have a very positive future ahead.
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A Trip Through the Labyrinth – The Regulatory Man in Full
And now to return to our commentary a few weeks back about the stultifying impact of ill-thought through rules and regulations (at best) (Brexit has intervened). This is our Regulatory State which broadly attempted to pick winners and losers and modify market behavior, to get an engineered outcome by using the blunderbuss of proscriptive rules and regulation.
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CREFC Annual Conference 2016: Headwinds or Head First Into the Wall?
The slow start to 2016 did not dampen the enthusiasm at CREFC’s Annual Conference, held last week in New York City. The conference saw record attendance, with standing-room-only crowds at virtually every panel. As with the Industry Leaders Conference in January, the hot topics on people’s minds were risk retention (and the rest of the regulatory headwinds), liquidity and the competitiveness of the CMBS market.
The conference made very clear that we are at an inflection point in the current cycle. The general mood of the conference, in our view, was the confluence of nervousness and cautious optimism. The gloominess of the first quarter, and fears over the “sky is falling,” has yielded to mild bouts of enthusiasm (at least if the parties were any indication). The capital markets have settled down over the past few months, spreads have tightened, and borrowers have begun to trickle back into the CMBS market.
Clearly our industry faces headwinds, and nobody is betting on a record second half, but we also did not hear anyone ringing the death knell for our business. We left the conference with more questions than answers. Here are some:Continue Reading CREFC Annual Conference 2016: Headwinds or Head First Into the Wall?
Risk Retention: It’s the Fourth Quarter and the Home Team is Getting Glum
We thought it would be useful to give a quick, interim update on the slow-motion train wreck that is our industry’s response to the upcoming effectiveness of the Risk Retention Rule. For those of you who have been blessedly snoozing under a rock these past couple of years, the Risk Retention Rule becomes effective on Christmas Eve and applies to all transactions closed (priced?) after that date. The Rule, to generalize a bit, requires the sponsor of a securitization to retain a 5% vertical or horizontal strip with the additional possibility of laying off some or all of that risk onto a qualified B piece buyer or a mortgage loan originator. For more detail, please see our OnPoints, our risk retention briefing white papers and many, many back issues of this CrunchedCredit.
Here’s the headline in Muddville in May of 2017:
We As An Industry Are In Trouble.
We as an industry don’t have a scalable solution to the problem. We as an industry do not know what this will cost, who will pay for it, and to what extent this is an existential risk to CRE capital formation as it has been conducted for the past twenty-five years.Continue Reading Risk Retention: It’s the Fourth Quarter and the Home Team is Getting Glum
Observations from ABS Vegas: The CLO Perspective
Over the past few years, the ABS Vegas conference has been the place for industry participants to congratulate each other on a job well done (most recently on a record-setting 2015 for CLO primary issuance), meet-and-greet with clients and generally unwind, making sure to sprinkle a few “important” meetings across the three-day span. However, following a January and February where CLO primary issuance was down well over 50% year-over-year with little sign of an upturn before the conference, most of us went into ABS Vegas 2016 with uneasy feelings.
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HVCRE: Surrender Is Not An Option
The way the new Basel III High Volatility Commercial Real Estate Lending Rule (HVCRE) was crafted, and is being enforced, is insane. We’ve written about this before. This is one of the purest examples of the regulatory apparatchik’s mule-headed refusal to look at data or engage with the banking establishment to develop thoughtful and effective rules. I think I saw a thoughtful and effective rule once.
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Current Marketplace Trends in Real Estate Crowdfunding
Today, there appears to be an ever-expanding number of sponsors and markets for crowdfunding. Commercial real estate is no exception. At the recent IMN US Real Estate Opportunity & Private Fund Investing Forum, Elizabeth Braman, Chief Production Officer of Realty Mogul, presented at a session focused on crowdfunding for real estate. It was very well attended. Dechert and CRE Financial Council (CREFC) recently hosted an equally well attended seminar in San Francisco featuring leaders in the field to discuss the current state of crowdfunding debt and equity real estate investments and that discussion, in our thinking, was illuminating about this fascinating, and perhaps fraught, new business.
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