Finance

Sale-leaseback transactions, a popular way for a company with its own real estate to get a quick cash infusion while staying put in its digs, have been on the downswing for the last several months, but one wouldn’t know it looking at YRC Worldwide’s latest activities. The Overland Park, Kans.-based transportation service provider just signed sale and financing leaseback deals valued at $122 million with Richmond, Va.’s Estes Express Lines, only two months after having entered into a $150 million sale-leaseback agreement with NATMI Truck Terminals L.L.C. The transaction with Estes involves a group of YRC industrial facilities located across…

With an eye toward an investment market with drastically reduced pricing, CB Richard Ellis Realty Trust has joined the ranks of firms looking to buy. To that end, the REIT has announced its second public offering, with the goal of raising up to $3 billion to invest in commercial property in the United States and abroad. The offering will consist 90 percent of shared priced at $10.00, and 10 percent priced at equal to or higher than $9.50 per share. The common shares will be offered through CNL Securities Corp. until Jan. 20, 2011, unless extended. The REIT said it…

At a time when many big banks are reducing how much business they give to mortgage brokers, New York-based Carlton Strategic Ventures L.L.C.–the principal transaction group of Carlton–has formed a $300 million first mortgage joint venture with an institutional real estate investment firm that will originate first mortgage loans up to a 65 percent loan-to-cost ratio. CSV Mortgage Capital will be targeting first mortgage loan transactions across the country with a total transaction size of $20 million to $100 million. The venture will target borrowers who have an opportunity to acquire their loans from the existing lenders at a discount…

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…