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 … Continue Reading
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 … Continue Reading
Earlier this month, I and a few of my colleagues here at Dechert attended CREFC’s 2014 High Yield Distressed Realty Assets Summit. The general sentiment of optimism and exuberance for 2014 felt in Miami was not as palpable at the NY Athletic Club, although this may have been brought on more by the fact that … Continue Reading
The warm weather is not the only thing descending on New York City this week as CREFC hosts its annual Distressed Debt Summit at the New York Athletic Club overlooking Central Park. March in New York City is famous for the Big East Tournament (speaking of distressed…), St. Patrick’s Day parades and love blooming along … Continue Reading
Two and a half years after Dodd-Frank and almost two years after the first hurriedly issued proposed rules, the six agencies (Department of Housing and Urban Development, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Federal Housing Finance Agency, Federal Reserve, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) charged with creating risk retention … Continue Reading
Rialto Capital – Series 2012-LT1 is a done deal. It represents a huge innovation in commercial real estate structured finance. This is the first liquidating trust vehicle successfully securitized in the United States since the famous RTC N Series and its progeny of the mid-1990s. Briefly, the transaction involved the pooling of sub-performing, non-performing and REO assets pursuant to … Continue Reading
Over a thousand lenders, borrowers, servicers, lawyers and other service providers have descended on Miami for three days of networking, meeting and doing things you just can’t do in DC. After a Sunday spent checking in, catching up and Tebowing, the conference kicked off in earnest this morning. I started my day with a PSA … Continue Reading
It’s that time of year when we’re forced to think about budgets and business plans. The pointy headed types from the accounting department want to know exactly what we’ll be doing the second week of next May and, as I’m sure every one of you have said (or thought) when confronted with such bureaucratic insanity: If I … Continue Reading
While wrapping your holiday presents, don’t forget about another regulatory gift that springs to life as of the new year: Rule 193 and the accompanying joys of Items 1111(a)(7) and 1111(a)(8) of Reg AB. The final rules for Dodd-Frank’s Section 945 – which we at CrunchedCredit.com have addressed before – are almost a year old and their … Continue Reading
What’s with all these public CMBS offerings? And what about all that rule-making? The registered market has otherwise been frozen since the pre-crisis days, and the cloud of heavy-handed regulation looming over our heads is anything but an invitation to dust off your public shelf. Moreover, given that some of those regulations may be (or have … Continue Reading
Here in Boston, we’ve had a busy but productive week since the CREFC June Convention culminated –punctuated with more than a million hockey fans witnessing a parade of Duck Boats waddle through the Back Bay. The Convention itself saw a smaller (albeit similarly excitable) parade of lenders, borrowers, servicers and other industry participants descend on … Continue Reading
Dechert LLP and Wells Fargo will be co-hosting the next CREFC After-Work Seminar on Tuesday, June 21 at the Omni Hotel in San Francisco. The topic of the seminar is "CMBS 2.0: A Securitization and Loan Level Perspective". The program will explore what’s changed, what’s stayed the same and what CMBS 2.0 means for commercial … Continue Reading
Greetings. What ever happened to those REMIC rules regarding property releases that we blogged and wrote about in 2009 (pdf) and 2010 (pdf)? The REMIC rules were revised in September 2009 to add flexibility to facilitate certain types of servicing transactions. However, under the new rules, if a property release occurs, the loan had to … Continue Reading
Early last decade, two Dechert partners, Tim Stafford and Dave Forti, published Mezzanine Debt: Suggested Standard Form of Intercreditor Agreement (pdf) in CMBS World. The article proposed a standard form of mortgage-mezzanine intercreditor that provided a portion of the bedrock upon which the architecture of CRE mezzanine lending would be built for the years to follow. … Continue Reading
Writing from the Acela again, en route to Back Bay Station after a short trip to New York to attend a CREFC After-Work Seminar we hosted. The space at our Bryant Park offices was full – I took a seat in the last row next to interim CEO John D’Amico (he seemed really pleased with … Continue Reading
Earlier this month, the New York Supreme Court issued a decision upholding the enforceability of a springing recourse guaranty given in connection with a commercial real estate loan that provided for a full "blow-up" upon voluntary bankruptcy. [Author’s Note: the decision can still be appealed: New Yorkers tend to call their trial court the "Supreme … Continue Reading
Last Wednesday, Laura Swihart and I attended CREFC’s after-work seminar on the new model set of representations and warranties, which the group is set to release in coming weeks. The model set is the product of a patchwork committee of 50-odd individuals representing the full gamut of industry types – securitization issuers, bond investors, rating … Continue Reading
The industry descended on our Nation’s Capital this morning for the 2011 CREFC conference: "Commercial Lending: The New World Order". It was -2 at Logan when my shuttle took to the air – needless to say I’m more than happy for the opportunity to spend a few days with friends, clients and colleagues in a … Continue Reading
Leading with the good news, the commercial mortgage finance market is back and growing at a brisk pace. From a few standalones in the fourth quarter of 2009, we’ve gotten to a remarkable place. Even during the first half of 2010, while lenders were hesitantly starting to lend, precious few lenders actually had real balance sheet availability for securitization. That changed. … Continue Reading
I am on a Halloween kick right now – it’s the elections. I hear Zombies are popular this year. Zombies indeed. Do you ever think this could be a deeply sophisticated and sly commentary on our GSEs? How droll. They are scary. How about that for a segue. The private securitization market for residential mortgages … Continue Reading
The gestation of CMBS 2.0 continues apace. A slow pace. The bulk of the deals look an awful lot like CMBS 1.0, but at least one, the Goldman/Citi deal, seemed to come right out of the playbook of the activist investment grade ad hoc committee that has been fulminating for fundamental change in the structure … Continue Reading
Issuers, investors, rating agencies and other industry participants continue to wrestle with the fundamental changes that will come to define CMBS 2.0. Among the (many) issues raised in the "Best Practices" guidelines issued by CREFC during June’s get-together was a proposal for market-wide, programmatic change to the package of representations and warranties given by securitization … Continue Reading
Goldman and Citi are about to launch a moderate size new CMBS conduit deal. This would follow on the heels of JP Morgan’s more or less successful offering in June. Comparing these two deals is going to be a huge “tell” about CMBS 2.0. If market chatter is right, the Goldman/Citi deal will have many … Continue Reading
Back from vacation … The sheer joy of re-engagement cannot be captured in words. But, can there be a better way of restarting than perusing FinReg? Being the parochial structured finance lawyer that I am, I start with Subtitle D with the Potemkin village-like name of "Improvements to the Asset Backed Securitization Process" and Section … Continue Reading
