Business Specialties

After posting a $21 million net loss for the second quarter, replacing its retiring CEO and chairman and elimination the position of executive vice president and chief strategy officer, The St. Joe Company entered into a new credit facility with an aggregate principal amount of $100 million with an option to increase the facility to $200 million through syndication with Branch Banking and Trust Company (BB&T). The new secured facility matures on Sept. 19, 2011. At the time of the announcement, Jacksonville, Fla.,-based St. Joe had not drawn any funds on the facility. This credit facility replaces Joe’s existing facility…

Economic conditions are going to be tougher for awhile before they improve, and the nation may even stagnate along the bottom, akin to Japan’s last recession, according to the discussion between two economists that opened CPN’s Net Lease Summit yesterday. But some benefits will come out of it, according to Craig Thomas, vice president and head of research at Citi Property Investors, and David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s Corp., during the Economic Face-Off, which was moderated by Matthew Bruck, managing director of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors Americas  and partner in McDuff Capital. The pain is…

Freddie Mac has announced a $548 million tax-exempt bond securitization with Citi. The deal was closed just days after the U.S. government took over the beleaguered agency. Collateral for the deal is a pool of fixed-rate tax-exempt and taxable multi-family housing revenue bonds, consisting of 79 tax-exempt bonds and nine taxable bonds. The transaction is evidence that despite the recent turmoil to hit Freddie Mac and the financial markets as a whole, the corporation, the nation’s second-largest mortgage provider, will still provide financing in a tight credit market. This transaction is the second largest tax-exempt bond securitization in the firm’s…

British financial giant Barclays PLC has jumped on the opportunity to acquire Lehman Brothers Holding Inc.’s North American investment banking and capital markets operations. The move comes only two days after the Lehman filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the wake of its unsuccessful attempt to prop itself up through a proposed spinoff of real estate assets and other reorganization efforts. Barclays had, in fact, been in negotiations last weekend to acquire Lehman itself, but that fell through without a federal backstop of Lehman’s assets. If the current proposed sale is approved by the bankruptcy court, Barclays would pay…

According to a story broken by the New York Times, Savings & Loan bank Washington Mutual is looking for a buyer. The paper noted that Goldman Sachs has been tapped to spearhead the process. A number of suitors were mentioned in the report. These include Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and HSBC. Should no one step up this could be another falling shoe that the Federal government may wind up picking up. The bank’s shares have fallen 94 percent in the last year. Its debt is now rated as junk. TPG Capital, which propped up WaMu with $2 billion of a…

The Federal Reserve’s monetary policy committee has decided to leave the key short-term rate at 2 percent at its just concluded meeting. The decision comes despite pressure to cut in the wake of Lehman Brothers, the dire straits in which American International Group and Washington Mutual find themselves, and other vexations roiling the U.S. and world financial markets. Since the announcement, the market has been fluctuating broadly. They closed up strongly however. The Dow ended at up 141.51, or 1.3 percent; the Nasdaq was up 1.28 percent, or 27.99, at 2,207.90; the S&P 500 finished up 1.75 percent, or 20.90,…

Only a week after posting multibillion-dollar quarterly losses, and unveiling a plan that would have spun off most of its commercial real estate assets, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. threw in the towel today by filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The move came after the company spent the weekend trying to sell itself to either Bank of America or Barclays Plc. Both potential suitors said “thanks but no thanks” after it became clear that the federal government wasn’t willing to backstop Lehman’s troubled or otherwise hard-to-value assets. Lehman investors have already made clear their disdain for the company. From a 52-week…

As commercial and investment bankers covered their eyes over the weekend, real estate investment trust executives were likely looking for opportunities. “If you are an illiquid, non-transparent and highly leveraged commercial real estate owner right now, you are in deep trouble,” Brad Case (pictured), vice president of research and industry information with the Washington, D.C.-based National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts (NAREIT), told CPN. “REITs are none of these.” According to Case, the REIT industry on average maintains about 40 percent leverage. At that level, if credit is available, they can borrow. If credit is not available, they can…

The Federal Trade Commission has denied a petition by the Federation of Exchange Accommodators (FEA), an industry group, to develop a rule regarding qualified intermediaries (QIs), who are independent third parties that facilitate 1031 exchanges. The FEA had asked the FTC to establish a mandatory registration process and operational standards for qualified intermediaries, who are currently virtually unregulated on the federal level. The FEA asked the FTC to “adopt a regulation that would apply the force of federal law to accepted industry standards and conduct that are intended to protect consumers who engage the services of exchange facilitators,” as it…