Commercial Real Estate Lurks as Next Potential Mortgage Crisis

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Federal Reserve and Treasury officials are scrambling to prevent the commercial-real-estate sector from delivering a roundhouse punch to the U.S. economy just as it struggles to get up off the mat.

Their efforts could be undermined by a surge in foreclosures of commercial property carrying mortgages that were packaged and sold by Wall Street as bonds. Similar mortgage-backed securities created out of home loans played a big role in undoing that sector and triggering the global economic recession. Now the $700 billion of commercial-mortgage-backed securities outstanding are being tested for the first time by a massive downturn, and the outcome so far hasn't been pretty.

The CMBS sector is suffering two kinds of pain, which, according to credit rater Realpoint LLC, sent its delinquency rate to 3.14% in July, more than six times the level a year earlier. One is simply the result of bad underwriting. In the era of looser credit, Wall Street's CMBS machine lent owners money on the assumption that occupancy and rents of their office buildings, hotels, stores or other commercial property would keep rising. In fact, the opposite has happened. The result is that a growing number of properties aren't generating enough cash to make principal and interest payments.

The other kind of hurt is coming from the inability of property owners to refinance loans bundled into CMBS when these loans mature. By the end of 2012, some $153 billion in loans that make up CMBS are coming due, and close to $100 billion of that will face difficulty getting refinanced, according to Deutsche Bank. Even though the cash flows of these properties are enough to pay interest and principal on the debt, their values have fallen so far that borrowers won't be able to extend existing mortgages or replace them with new debt. That means losses not only to the property owners but also to those who bought CMBS -- including hedge funds, pension funds, mutual funds and other financial institutions -- thus exacerbating the economic downturn.

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125167422962070925.html?mod=rss_whats_news_us

so many commercial properties sitting vacant and the owners/developers running out of cash.

How much impact on the economy if some or all of these mortgages fail?

so you will buy hedge funds, pension funds, mutual funds..so the big guys can cash out and leave you and I .."the little guys"..strapped with the bad investments!

...and numerous other empty boxes big and small. I can't forsee any kind of economic recovery that would fill them again.

I suspect they are the new version of "rust belt" factories.

When and if the economy picks up they will probably be torn down and replaced with efficient low energy urban housing units.