Business Specialties

On Tuesday, it was the stimulus in Denver. On Wednesday, it was the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan in Mesa, Ariz. (Thursday, Detroit?) Unfortunately, “HASP” doesn’t make for a snappy acronym, but it is the Obama administration’s name for its newly announced plan to slow down the hemorrhaging of the residential real estate market, especially spiking foreclosure rates, and especially in places like Arizona. “In the past, if you found yourself in a situation like this, you could have sold your home and bought a smaller one with more affordable payments,” the president said, recalling those carefree pre-credit freeze days…

Though net lease retail assets will be a harder sell this year than they have been in years past, investors are far from ready to write off the entire category, according to Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Services Inc. In a new report, an advance copy of which was obtained by CPN, Marcus & Millichap projects that many net lease investors will focus on fast food restaurants and gas stations, as well as distressed assets in all categories.During a time when net lease retail asset prices have generally stayed flat or dipped, asset values in some categories have been…

While commercial real estate like other asset classes has been suffering in this recession, there are silver linings, according to Jay Brinkman, Mortgage Bankers Association chief economist, and Jamie Woodwell, vice president of commercial real estate research, speaking during the second opening session of the MBA’s Commercial Real Estate Finance/Multifamily Housing Convention & Expo yesterday. For one thing, the absolute levels of loans are well below what they were in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Woodwell noted. What makes things more difficult this time is the higher levels of complexity brought on by the greater splitting up of risk…

What’s the money quote from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s speech introducing his plan for all that money Congress allocated last year to TARP II? Maybe it’s that the plan will “cost money, involve risk and take time,” which he said Tuesday morning. Investors didn’t much like that, perhaps because Geithner was a little short on specifics, especially on how to value those pesky toxic mortgage-related assets that Geithner’s public-private scheme would seek to take off the hands of banks. Maybe that’s what the Secretary was talking about when he said that “we will go through periods in which things get…

The Mortgage Bankers Association’s analysis of loan maturity volumes has determined that while concerns about a large volume of loans maturing this year are valid, the majority of those loans are short-term floating-rate CMBS and mortgages held by credit companies, warehouse facilities and other investors. Other loans, including fixed-rate CMBS, mortgages held by life companies and multi-family mortgages held or guaranteed by the general-services enterprises are in the minority. Indeed, of the $171 billion, or 11 percent of non-bank commercial and multi-family mortgages coming due in 2009, just $19 billion are fixed-rate CMBS, noted MBA vice president of commercial real…

Is it possible that some of the worrisome inventory of unsold houses nationwide is now, slowly, starting to be sold off? The National Association of Realtors said on Tuesday that pending home sales rose 6.3 percent in December from the previous month, with gains concentrated in the South and the Midwest. Or is that just a weird little uptick on the longer road to lower sales and a continuing residential real estate slump? Economists do not agree on the matter, as usual. But the fact is that anyone still in a position to buy a house can do so much…

For real estate-owning businesses seeking a quick cash infusion, selling the property they occupy and then leasing it from the new owner has proven to be a popular move, but the credit crunch has put a damper on such activity, which makes transportation service provider YRC Worldwide Inc.’s closing of the first phase of a $151million sale-leaseback deal quite a coup. According to global commercial real estate research and consulting firm Real Capital Analytics, sale-leaseback transactions decreased 51 percent from 2007 to 2008, and fourth quarter numbers are even more dire; sale-leaseback deals plunged 86 percent from the last three months…

Sale-leaseback deal volume got off to a slow start in January, not a surprising development in light of the generally sluggish investment sales market. According to Real Capital Analytics Inc., sale-leaseback deals totaled only $183 million for the month. That figure represents only a fraction of the volume tallied for January 2008, when Real Capital Analytics tallied $790 million.In the biggest sale-leaseback deal reported so far this year, Gilead Sciences Inc. disclosed last Thursday that it had completed the $137.5 million acquisition of a 163,000-square-foot office building and 30 adjacent acres in Foster City, Calif. The transaction, a partial sale-leaseback,…

Independent executive compensation consulting firm Steven Hall & Partners and executive search firm Equinox Partners have found that those at the top of the masthead at REITs in the United States have not escaped the real estate industry’s stock woes. The results of a study by the two New York City-based companies show that, at the median, individual REIT CEOs have seen the value of their equity holdings nosedive by about 49 percent over the last year. The credit crisis kicked off the downward spiral in real estate across the country in 2007 and it’s been a rocky road ever since….

Despite the departure of its CEO, the slashing of a dividend payment, a halt to new development plans and a workforce reduction, it remains largely business as usual as industrial REIT ProLogis works to straighten out its financial situation and rework a massive maturing debt load.Denver-headquartered ProLogis, the world’s largest industrial warehouse developer, remains active in the leasing business and has even been able to get its hands on hundreds of millions in financing as of late, neither of which is any small feat in today’s market.The company was stung badly by the credit crunch last fall. By the time…