CRE CLO

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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…

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…

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…

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…

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 the finish line with a meager $25 billion this year.  What happened?  The demand for CRE leverage certainly hasn’t changed.  The CRE market has gotten significantly bigger since 2008 and consequently, the need for leverage has grown concomitantly.  The nature of the underlying real estate assets hasn’t changed all that much, nor the nature of the ownership structure, albeit it is probably a bit more institutional today than it was in 2008.  The product is no different, in large measure, today than it was back then and indeed in some minor, twiddling respects might even be better from the perspective of the borrower.
Continue Reading Can We (Should We) Try to Fix the Conduit Before It’s Gone?

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

Welcome, dear reader, to our annual Golden Turkey Awards.  But for my commitment to absolute fairness and concern over the appearance of impropriety, I would have awarded the first Golden Turkey Award to Dechert for actually getting the Golden Turkey Awards done this year.  What a crazy year end.  The market is insane.

On the other hand, while time is short, there’s plenty to bloviate about.  I remember last year we were absolutely ready for the end of the Trump administration because the Biden administration promised a “dull is cool” vibe.  Well, dull has been a failure.  The farrago of lingering Covid, a return to something which is clearly not normalcy, but something new and with a pond full of black swans flopping around, it is not dull.  So, how’s that working out for you?  The follies of 2021 at least make writing this column easier.  So, we went digging for inanity for the purpose of making gentle fun of things that broadly annoy us and, shockingly, we found things to talk about.  So, here we are once again.Continue Reading 2021 Golden Turkeys

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?