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Tag: Commercial Real Estate


Commercial Real Estate Watch

“In order to sort through the disaster that is Wells Fargo’s commercial loan portfolio, the bank has hired help from outside experts to pour over the books… and they are shocked with what they are seeing. Not only do the bank’s outstanding commercial loans collectively exceed the property values to which they are attached, but derivative trades leftover from its acquisition of Wachovia are creating another set of problems for the already beleaguered San Francisco-based megabank.”

“The CRE alarmists may yet be proven right, but the delayed reckoning due to CDS [credit default swap’s] accounting means it may take a while for these shoes to start dropping.”

“The next wave of the credit crisis is about to hit — a collapse in com mercial real estate and potential explosion of bank failures. With its resources tapped out by the first wave, what should Washington do?

“Over the last year, the Federal Reserve doubled the size of its balance sheet, and took unprecedented action in monetizing government debt and extending credit to financial institutions. Now it must head off inflation and extricate itself from $5 trillion-plus in credit exposure from various bailouts. The Treasury, meanwhile, is issuing debt at the fastest pace in peacetime history.

“Now comes the next crisis. The same factors that caused the residential bubble — easy credit, lax lending standards and booming mortgage-backed-securities underwriting — also drove commercial real-estate overvaluation. But the commercial market lags the residential one by about a year, so this bubble is still popping.”

Commercial Real Estate Loan Foreclosures Coming to Pass

From Calculated Risk:

This is happening all across the country: falling demand [for commercial real estate] and still more office supply coming available as large commercial real estate projects are completed. This means falling rents and property values. And as the construction loans come due, there will be more and more losses for lenders.

From WashingtonPost article cited in Calculated Risk’s blog:

“We may see the commercial version of the subprime situation,” said Steve Silverman, director of the Montgomery County Department of Economic Development.

This was predicted earlier this year by Gerald Celente, founder of Trends Research Institute. The question is, will the effects of this and other situations prove to be as dire as he predicted? We’ll have to see I guess.

Uncharted Waters

I’m just not sure why the FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee), after having been wrong on multiple assessments of the economy in the not so distant past, would be so quick to say we’re now on the fast -track to recovery when the stats and the history of past crises does not lend us that kind of optimistic conclusion. From Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (Archive):

CRE Foreclosures Rising (Video)

Jim the Realtor driving around Oceanside, CA, showing the rate of commercial foreclosures in the area.

The Collapse of ’09

I have no idea if these things will come to pass. It’s merely conjecturing and forecasting, so don’t stake your emotions in this and get all worked up. However, at the same time, this particular trends forecaster, Gerald Celente, has been dead-on in predicting major market crises and global events since 1980. He correctly predicted the ’87 crash, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the dot com bust, amongst a host of other things.

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