ShareA sign that the commercial real estate (CRE) market continues to cause headaches comes this weekend in the form of news of Capmark Financial’s imminent demise. Capmark is one of America’s largest commercial property lenders with about $10 billion in assets.
The New York Times’ Dealbook reports:
The Capmark Financial Group, the big commercial real estate finance [...]

ShareThe following post is from Stratfor via John Mauldin, who is a Best-Selling author and recognized financial expert. He is also editor of the free Thoughts From the Frontline that goes to over 1 million readers each week. For more information on John or his FREE weekly economic letter go to: http://www.frontlinethoughts.com/learnmore.

I think you will [...]

ShareIf you recall, at the end of May, I wrote a post “Both initial claims and continuing claims now pointing to recovery” that said jobless claims data were pointing to an imminent recovery.  The general gist of my argument was recovery would come by year’s end or early in 2010. But we needed to focus [...]

ShareThis is an astonishing video in China with Hugh Hendry, the money manager who is bearish on China who I profiled earlier this month.  In it, he shows us building after building after building – all of them massive and all of them empty.  And you see yet dozens of others still in construction in [...]

ShareWhen you think about property, you should really be looking at its worth as the present value of future cash flow streams.  This is true for residential, commercial, rental or travel property.  One reason is that property is fungible, meaning what is a owner-occupied primary residence ca just as easily be a rental accommodation. It [...]

ShareThe first bank nationalization in German history is about to take place. At issue is Hypo Real Estate (HRE), a troubled Munich-based company that lends to commercial property developers and to build offices, hotels, roads, airports, you name it.
This issue has been building for nearly 7 months. Back in late September, just after Lehman [...]

ShareThe Bloomberg video below makes it seem that Whitney believes the stress tests are a sham. She says the tests are a theoretical exercise whereby banks ask: “what will our earnings power be in two years after we sell off these ‘toxic’ assets?” She goes on to suggest that the answer to this question [...]

ShareThe S&P Real Estate Index is down 60%. This segment gives a good overview of how commercial real estate is doing and what to expect going forward.

Recently, I was discussing the economy with a lawyer expert in both commercial real estate and taxation, workouts, and bankruptcy. He made a few statements that I felt relevant enough to pass on here.

Last year, the British economy was one of the hardest hit by the now evident commercial property (CRE) implosion. Prices fell 27.1% in 2008, including a record 5.8% in December alone, suggesting the trend is accelerating. I mentioned in my “Top Ten Predictions for the 2009 global economy” that I believed commercial property writedowns would be numerous because of securitzation. Ireland, the U.K. and the U.S. are tops on the list for a CRE correction. You should note that this trend is very much related to declines in the real economy as retail is where the greatest problems now reside.