Apartment Building Investment Loan Rate Trends Lower as 10yr Treasury and Spread Fall.

The apartment building investment loan rate we track continued to trend downward as both the 10yr Treasury (T10) and the spread between the two came in during April. Today’s new rate on the loan is 4.733%, a 212 basis point spread over the T10 which was in the  2.61% area today. The six month moving average spread continues to fall suggesting that lenders are more confident and/or aggressive but the spread itself is above the March 17 low of 209bp.

This month we add a new rate which the ULI (Urban Land Institute) reports on from the Trepp survey. According to the ULI the Trepp rate is what large institutional borrowers could expect to pay on a 10 year fixed rate, less than 60% LTV loan for a “crème de la crème” core apartment property located in a gateway market. We track this rate as a barometer of what the largest lenders are offering their best customers on the most secure loans for any advanced warning about future rate and spread changes.  See the ULI<60LTV Rate on the chart below (in gold). Note that the spread we chart is between 10yr loan we track (in orange) and the T10 (in blue):

Apartment Building Investment Loan Rate versus Ten Year Treasury Rate May 2014

Speaking of the spread between the T10 and the ten year apartment loan rate, now that Continue reading Apartment Building Investment Loan Rate Trends Lower as 10yr Treasury and Spread Fall.

The One Shoe That Didn’t Drop in The Financial Collapse- Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities. #CRE

Heidi N. Moore was talking with a investor who specializes in buying distressed commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) and I was reminded of something Warren Buffett said back in 2007:

“When people start dropping shoes you really don’t know whether they’re a one-legged guy or a centipede.”

The investor was saying that the commercial real estate (CRE) market has been under the same pressure as the housing market but the CRE market hasn’t crashed. Why hasn’t that shoe dropped… and why won’t it?

Banks avoided writing down commercial mortgages by renegotiating with their borrowers

The investor said that CRE was “rife with all the same corruption as the housing market: banks didn’t do their homework before signing loans, ratings agencies were overly generous in classifying weak loans as strong, but when it came [time] to mark down the value of the struggling commercial real-estate loans, many banks simply refused. They inflated the values of the loans to make their balance sheets look good.” [And therefore could keep all their bailout funds at work speculating in derivatives and jacking their bonuses instead of being set aside to cover losses.]

There are two other reasons that the CRE market and the CMBS tied to it didn’t crash: 0% interest rates, which means commercial borrowers weren’t punished with higher interest payments; and more importantly Continue reading The One Shoe That Didn’t Drop in The Financial Collapse- Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities. #CRE