In short
Odd Lots Podcast Episode Summary
Episode Details
- Title: What Commercial Real Estate Stress Means for Banks and Bond Funds
- Hosts: Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway
- Guest: Jim Costello, Chief Economist for Real Assets at MSCI
- Release Date: [Insert Date]
Overview In this episode, the hosts discuss the dual concerns currently affecting investors: the instability of regional banks and the weakness in the commercial real estate (CRE) market. While these issues initially appeared separate, they are intricately connected due to regional banks' substantial exposure to CRE lending.
Key Themes and Concepts
- Interconnection of Regional Banks and Commercial Real Estate
- Regional banks have a higher concentration of lending towards commercial real estate compared to larger banks.
- Concerns arose after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), highlighting the risks associated with regional banks' CRE loans.
- Understanding the CRE Market
- Commercial real estate is not a uniform market; it encompasses various sectors (e.g., office buildings, multifamily residential, medical facilities) which perform differently under economic stress.
- The episode emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between different types of CRE when assessing risk and potential for default.
- Risk Factors for Regional Banks
- Default Risk: There are rising concerns about the ability of borrowers to refinance loans amidst tightening lending conditions, potentially leading to defaults.
- Lending Standards: Following the turmoil in the banking sector, banks are tightening lending standards, which could further restrict financing for CRE projects.
- Economic Landscape
- The discussion includes insights on how past downturns, such as the 2008 financial crisis, shape current investor behavior and expectations.
- Jim Costello points out that while there are parallels between past crises and the current situation, today's real estate market is in a healthier position due to more conservative loan origination practices pre-crisis.
- Challenges in Financing CRE
- The episode outlines the complexity of financing CRE, explaining how different financing sources (banks, private credit funds, insurance companies) interact and compete.
- Costello provides insights on the regulatory landscape affecting banks and how it influences their lending behaviors.
- Maturity Wall and Income Stress
- A significant concern is the maturity wall, with many loans coming due around 2023-2025, particularly those issued during periods of low interest rates.
- The hosts discuss the potential for income stress across various CRE sectors, especially with changing occupancy rates and shifting demands in office spaces.
Key Takeaways
- Diverse Risk Profiles: Different types of CRE (e.g., office vs. medical buildings) have varying levels of risk, and blanket assessments of the market can be misleading.
- Regulatory Environment: The regulatory landscape plays a crucial role in shaping the lending behaviors of regional banks, impacting their exposure to CRE risks.
- Market Behavior: Historical market behaviors and investor strategies are influencing current expectations and responses to emerging challenges in the CRE sector.
Conclusion The episode sheds light on the complexities and interconnectedness of regional banking stability and commercial real estate health. As the situation unfolds, it is essential for investors to understand the nuances within the CRE market to navigate potential risks effectively.
For more detailed insights and discussions, listen to the episode [here](https://omnystudio.com/listener).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
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1:22Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal. And I'm Tracy Allaway. Tracy, there's two things that people, well, there's all kinds of things people are like very attuned to these days. But I would say what's going on with regional banks has obviously become a huge focus, you know, with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. And then what is going on with commercial real estate? And we talked about that recently. And everyone knows like the office woes that are hitting major cities like New York. Two things that are like top of mind for many people. Well, and I think they started out sort of separate to each other because there were concerns about commercial real estate even before Silicon Valley Bank went bust.
2:07But since then, and since we've had the turmoil in the banking sector, the deposit flight, there is a concern that that is going to also start affecting the CRE outlook. And basically, these two things are impacting each other and compounding each other at the same time, because, of course, regional banks have quite substantial exposure to commercial real estate. Right. So that was the interesting thing about SVB specifically, which is that there seemed to be many problems there. But one thing it was not, it did not really seem to be about the credit quality of the assets. It was a rate story.
2:44It was a deposit concentration story. But it wasn't about like, oh, they have some sort of like asset side exposure to something that's troubled. But then, as you point out correctly, in the immediate wake, a bunch of people sort of stuck up their finger like, oh, by the way, guys, these regional banks you're worried about, they also are sort of disproportionately the funders of commercial real estate. This is it. So there's two things here. So one, there's concern about the commercial real estate loans that some of these smaller regional banks might hold. Are those actually going to default? Are they going to become distressed in some way?
3:17Are they going to be able to refinance them in the current environment? And then secondly, as you get the stress in the banking system, as you see deposits pulled from smaller banks, are they still going to be able to pour money into that sector? And those two things are sort of impacting each other. They go in both directions, as you sort of clarify there. And I think the other thing, too, is like, you know, people like doom. I mean, I don't, but you know what I'm saying? Like, people are still like, this is the exact type of thing that gets people going. And people post all these charts that most people, you know, like, don't aren't really equipped to understand, including myself.
3:55Like, I don't really, you know, I'm a novice on this stuff. And so I think it's kind of important to like, let's sort of get real. Let's put some numbers and like, how big of a deal is this? Because there is a lot of like, oh, you know, people have these fantasies of 2008 in their head and stuff like that. I think people hear this is a$20 trillion market and they think, oh, this is a very big deal. But of course, as we spoke about in a relatively recent episode with Rich Hill, it's not a monolithic market. And a multifamily residential development is different to an office building in downtown New York that might be empty now.
4:30And also, you know, a big bank is going to have a different risk profile to the sector than a smaller regional bank. So it's important to dive into the details. Yeah, totally. And, you know, there's office, which we all know, because you could just pull up like a chart of like a big office rate, like a tornado or something. And then there's medical, which is probably fine. And there's all these different categories. So we really need to, given the interest, we really need to dive sort of like deeper into like, all right, let's talk about some of these exposures. Let's talk about these relationships.
5:00Let's get some like real numbers rather than just sort of like - Let's get granular, baby. Let's get granular. All right. Well, we have the perfect guest to speak about this. We're going to be speaking to Jim Costello, chief economist over at MSCI's Real Assets Team. He was recommended to us by our recent guest, Ben Carlos Taipin. He said, this is the guy you want to talk about. That was a really good episode on New York City Residential. So I always love it when a guest recommends another guest. So that's usually a good sign. Jim, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Hey, great to be here.
5:33Let's just start with the sort of like key question that I see frequently asserted, which is that regional banks have more exposure to commercial real estate as a share of their assets than the big banks. Is this just like, is this a fact? And what does that mean? The thing that people have been highlighting is the fact that regional banks are a bigger share of bank lending to commercial real estate. And they've been taking that as a sign that maybe these regional banks are more of a problem for commercial real estate than anything else. The challenge is people are looking at the Fed flow of funds number in a funny way.
6:11The Fed flow of funds database, it's a fantastic thing. There's a lot to dig into there. But if you're not careful, you can look at the wrong figures. and people get hung up on the bank lending. But banks are not everything in the commercial real estate lending world. Banks, we have our own approach to getting at the lending universe, kind of working from the ground up from every transaction and every building that's sold and figuring out who made the loan. From 2015 to 2019, about 48 % of all commercial real estate loans in the universe of properties, 2.5 million and greater. That was in the banking realm.
6:46So already 48 % in the banking realm. And of that, maybe 60 % was the local and regional banks. Okay. Now there's a difference there, 60 % and 70%. There's a 10 % difference. And part of that comes into we're only tracking everything 2.5 million and up, the institutional universe. If you have a former gas station in Tupelo, Mississippi that's been converted to a barbecue shack, we're not tracking that. Okay. No institutional investor is really interested in that kind of property. The Fed, from a regulatory standpoint, they have to think about all capital flows. So they're looking at everything that goes in there.
7:25But the key point is you can't just look at the banks. You have to look at the life insurance companies. You have to look at the debt funds. You have to look at the CMBS market, CLOs, everything. Right. So just on this point, maybe we can back up a bit and talk about what exactly the concern is here. Because my impression is before the collapse of SVB, a lot of it was, well, these commercial real estate loans, you know, whether they're unsecured or secured via CMBS, there's a concern that they're going to be in trouble. They aren't going to be able to refinance. They might default banks. I take your point about life insurers and other big investors, but there are a lot of banks who are heavily invested in CMBS.
8:05And then at the same time, now the concern seems to be that with the recent turmoil in deposits, maybe banks start to tighten their lending standards. Maybe that cuts off some financing for commercial real estate. And so you have that aspect of it, too. But what exactly is the worry here? Yeah. And banks have been tightening their standards over the last three quarters. You look at the Fed's survey of senior loan officers. They're all getting more cautious. even before the news on SVB hit. And Jay Powell has been saying that with this event, maybe they don't need to tighten as much because this turmoil is creating a little bit more constraint in the credit markets that is helping them to limit the kind of exuberant activity that was underway.
8:53The banks will do it naturally now. Right, right. But it's a circular issue. And the issue that we faced during the financial crisis was that you had cash flowing assets that couldn't get refinanced because lenders were afraid to issue a new loan. And so if somebody had to buy it, it was now available at a much lower price, which then got into the market data. And then the lenders see, oh, well, prices are falling. I want to be even more restrictive. And it was a vicious downward spiral until all the federal regulators stepped in and put a floor under that negative decline. So that was the safety net, to put a floor under prices.
9:34But this time, you have that dynamic in play to some degree with pressure on prices to fall. They have been falling recently. And lenders becoming more restrictive when they do originate a loan. It's at lower LTVs than before, at higher interest rates. So you're not able to get the same kind of return expectation out of investment if you do that, which limits deal activity, which pushes volume down. So it is a little bit different than the 2008 situation, though. And this is the key thing. Every downturn that I've been working through, there's this human behavior to always try and fight the last war.
10:11Look at the last bad event, and you're looking at that, well, here's what happened. So I got to look out for those same things here. But conversely, not just look out for the same bad things. A lot of the real estate people I talk to are looking for the best opportunities that come out of it, out of every downturn. Everybody's always tried to use the playbook of the person who made money in the last downturn. Everybody wanted to be Sam Zell for a bit, but there's only one Sam Zell. Everybody wanted at the beginning of the COVID crisis, they thought that we would have another downturn just like the global financial crisis.
10:43And so buying all the distressed debt like before was exactly the same way to make money. They were wrong then too because there was different factors at play. This time, there are some things that rhyme with the financial crisis, but going in, we're in a much healthier place. We had loans that were being originated at more conservative terms than before. It's not like you have all these toxic loans that were being made. The only challenge is that rates have gone up so much that things that we're able to finance before, they're going to have to do something else when it comes up for refinancing.
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13:10Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. All right. I have a ton of questions, but to start off, like when it comes to the financing of commercial real estate, and I want to get into like the breadth that is commercial real estate and that it's not just like office buildings in New York City. But when it comes to the financing of commercial real estate generally, is there something about the business model of the small slash regional banks that makes them more natural sources of financing to these projects than some of the, you know, the really big, too big to fail banks?
13:56There is regulatory shopping in the financial world. You have some groups, like the debt funds, that they're really only regulated at the level of the SEC when they're raising capital. They're making a private loan. There's no state bank regulator, no insurance regulator. They're just doing their own thing. The local banks, they don't have the same kind of restrictions placed on them as the large national banks. And over time, some of the restrictions have been eased a bit. I know some banks have explicitly tried to keep their book of business below a certain level so they don't get that regulatory burden because then there's extra costs that go into it.
14:41And just the administrative cost starts to rise at an exponential pace once you get above a certain threshold level for those regulatory burdens. And really since around 2015, when there were some tightening up of those standards and for the larger banks, the smaller banks started to gain more share of all the bank lending activity. There's a slight diversion, but I actually am really curious about those administrative costs. You said they rise exponentially. And so I am curious, what happens when a bank flips over to that larger size and they all want to avoid it? And SVB tried to avoid getting these sort of larger designations, et cetera.
15:20But what actually does happen internally in terms of the regulatory obligations and how that sort of changes the way the bank must operate? At that point, they have to hire a lot more risk management people and do a lot more work on scenario planning around what happens to different Fed scenarios that the Fed will publish around the economy and potential changes to asset prices, not just in real estate, but other sectors. And it's a big administrative burden. Some of the bank managers that I talked to, the presidents of some of these small local banks, they've noted that when they were hiring during the aftermath of the financial crisis, they felt bad that they were hiring more administrative workers than loan officers, not the folks who are going out and producing money for them.
16:08And their worry was, if I go above that threshold, I'm going to have to hire a lot more administrative folks to do all the CCAR testing that they were talking about back in the day and run all these different scenarios and just more compliance people. Got it. And so if you're hiring a third of your people who are in compliance and not income producing, you're going to try and avoid that. Also, if you get really big, I think you start to get regulators who are situated on site in your bank, right? Just to kind of monitor how things are going. I don't know about that. I do know I was visiting one client once and all of a sudden regulators came in, sort of an announcement that morning they were coming in, and the atmosphere in the place was suddenly very tense.
16:50So just on this regulation notion, it is true that commercial real estate has been on regulators' radars, collective radars, as a source of potential risk for some time. What exactly was the concern there? And can you kind of give us a quick synopsis of how that regulation has changed over the past few years? Well, in 2015, that was a watershed for certain types of loans. The high volatility commercial real estate regulations came in, HVCRE, so that the loans with shorter terms, lenders had to hold more capital in reserve. So suddenly it became more expensive to originate loans like that. Construction lending was dead center for that activity because those are typically short-term loans that just pay out very quickly once the construction project's done.
17:43And we saw a distinct move in construction financing. There, it used to be something like 70 % of construction financing was bank-driven, and that really declined. The debt funds, who didn't face any of that kind of regulatory burden, they really stepped into that and started originating more construction loans. Banks are still the prime - What's the number to, yeah, like, so it was 70 % was it down to? It's, my recollection, it was like 52 % recently. So it's still a majority bank financing, but the debt funds really aid into that business. And some of these lenders, when I talk with them, they complain about their competitors, how they're just so aggressive compared to them.
18:26And they kind of lifted the market in this period from 2015 to 2019 because they were originating loans at much higher LTVs, much lower interest rates, and with very few covenants out there because they were underwriting differently than banks. Banks, they underwrite a loan wanting to avoid in a foreclosure situation. They want to avoid what we call in the industry REO. Not the band, but REO, the real estate owned situation. They want to avoid that because if I'm a big bank, what do I know about running an apartment building? What do I know about managing an office building? I'd rather have the experts take care of that and I just collect a nice stable yield.
19:12So I want to underwrite to avoid that. So I'll put covenants in there to make sure that if occupancy falls below a certain level, that there are scrapes of any revenue. So I make sure that I'm whole. So they put those kind of things in there. The debt funds, they didn't do any of that because the debt funds, a lot of them started as equity shops that had their own investments and own management in place. And they viewed it as an opportunity. It might be a situation where I have either a nice stable yield and I can help my investors that way. But if I had the tail situation where there's a foreclosure, I have this equity management shop on the side.
19:50I can just take the property at a lower basis than before. And I know how to run a property and I could probably do it better than those people who were coming to me for a loan. So I'll put it into that shop and raise some capital to stabilize it and I'll be good. So it's a different behavior. And it's, you know, those were the folks who were the most aggressive. and did some of the larger loans in that period of 2020, 2021 when interest rates were so low. And typically they had short terms as well. So we have a wall of maturities coming in 2023 through 2025. And those aggressive loans are the ones that I think are going to see the most attention.
20:28This was exactly what my next question was going to be. But talk to us about what the maturity wall actually looks like at this point in time. Because again, this is where a lot of the worry is stemming from this idea that you have the sort of front loaded wall that is coming due in the next year or two. And how are banks slash private investors, to your point, going to actually be able to refinance those loans? The originators of loans, for them, their ability to refinance, they have a certain cost of capital. They'll offer a borrower, okay, we can refinance that loan, but it's a lower LTV than before.
21:05The rate is higher. And if somebody bought a property back in 2013 and the loan matures in 2023, you've had a tremendous amount of price growth along the way. Even though we've had some price declines recently, there's probably still enough that they might be able to refinance that at a higher rate and keep that alive. Assuming that you don't have a problem on income. And I'm going to put that to the side for the moment, because that's another challenge. But just dealing with one challenge at a time here. So if you had a long-term loan you're refinancing, yeah, maybe you're not going to get the same proceeds as before, but you might be okay.
21:41But if you had a loan that was originated in 2021 when we saw a record low interest rate environment and you had a very high LTV and record low interest rate, thinking that game would continue forever, you may have a bad day as you try to get that refinance because you're going to go to a lender who will offer you money but it's going to be a very low LTV compared to before and with a mortgage rate closer to a seven percent than a three and a half percent and so the numbers may not work for those folks and they're going to have to have you know there's three options for some of these folks maybe they can do a cash-in refinancing where they bring more equity to the table themselves in their own pocket.
22:26And they might want to do that just so they don't end up in a default situation if the property, if they still have an expectation of price growth ahead or income growth, or there's still some fees that make them whole. And they think of it as a brand new investment at that point. Or maybe they get some outside investor to bring that cash in a preferred equity situation. And that person gets some of the upside of the project moving forward so that you, the investor, can at least still collect some fees on the project. And then another opportunity is to literally hand the keys over to the lender.
22:59A jingle mail. I know we're making the point about how this might not be 2008, but these are all very 08 type terms, real estate owned and jingle mail. Just in a different context. But I wanted to, you know, you mentioned setting aside the income question because we've been talking about rates, we've been talking about price appreciation. Can you break down where is their income stress, where is their not income stress within the commercial real estate world? And how are you thinking about that particular aspect of it right now? Yeah, the income stress is a bit of a challenge, and there still is a lot of uncertainty around it.
23:37Let's start with offices. You were saying earlier, hey, everything is not Manhattan offices, but let's talk about Manhattan offices. Okay, okay. Yeah, please. It's Wednesday today when we happen to be recording, walking around the city. There's more people out today because it's a Wednesday. That's when more people are around. But if you're around on a Monday or a Friday, it's usually pretty empty. And so people see that and they see that, hey, there are less people coming in. The subway ridership is at like 65 % of the previous peak levels. So obviously, the space is being utilized less. That said, the fiscal side of it, the fiscal occupancy, the tenants who are still on the hook for the space, there still is some good occupancy in that direction.
24:20There's a lot of sublet space where firms are signaling that they want to get rid of it, but they still are paying. And so there's a short-term challenge that everyone knows that there's going to be a reduction in demand eventually, but right now there's still some income coming in. And so there's a term in the industry, WALT, weighted average lease term. And if you have a property that has a very long lease term ahead, even if people aren't using it as much, if you have some high quality tenants who are unlikely to default, that might seem like a safe investment. But if I've got a tenant who has one year left on the lease, and I see that the building is half empty most days, I'm going to be concerned about what happens to income there moving forward.
25:06So it's a slow motion thing. Everybody sees the direction it's going. That's one of the things about real estate. Forget about, you know, I used to work with a bunch of economists in Boston. There's a lot of complex math we did, but forget about all that. The real estate market, there's all these sticky things. You just count the number of cranes and you can see whether you're going to have some construction challenges ahead. You just look at the number of people walking into a building and you can just get a sense of what the potential demand is. All those kind of rule of thumb measures have been telling people that there's going to be some sort of reduction in demand.
25:39And we know that's coming, but nobody's really been able to fully quantify it yet. It's something we just have to live through over the next few years before we see all the leases burn off. All right. But that was great. But what about the non-Manhattan office? Yeah. And two, I guess, sort of two interrelated questions, but like Rich Hill, the number he said was 20 trillion. But when we think about that 20 trillion, how much is this sort of like prime city office that might not ever come back to pre-COVID levels? And then can you talk a little bit more about these other areas, medical, et cetera, are they doing fine in terms of income and income expectations?
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26:19There's a couple of things to digest there. The office market, most of the US office market is a suburban market. And that goes back to the 1970s and 1980s when we saw a surge in construction in those areas. And it's not just suburban New York, A lot of it is the development of the Sunbelt states and as they entered the modern economy in that time and became service sector economies as opposed to agriculture and manufacturing. Those office buildings in those areas, they do constitute a large part of the office market. Manhattan, off the top of my head, I think is about 40 % of all CBD office space in the United States.
26:57So that's why people like to focus on Manhattan because it's an indicator of where the whole CBD office market is going nationally. But that suburban market is a bigger market overall. And it's been bigger in terms of the deal volume recently. The last, really since 2015, when the Chinese investors pulled back from investing in the US, deal volume fell off for the CBD locations. In the past, it had always been sort of half and half. Half of all investment was in suburbs. Half of all investment was in CBD locations. And that really started to turn a corner then when the prices hit a record low and there was just very little upside left.
27:36So there's been a lot less transaction activity in the CBD locations even before all the current – CBD is central business. Central, yeah, sorry. No, no, I'm not making sure. Yeah. And so there's been a decline ever since. So it has been important, but it had been priced to perfection back around 2015. So there wasn't that same push to continue to invest in it as there had been for more suburban locations.
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30:01Discover how at mastercard.com slash commercial acceptance. I want to go back to what you were talking about when it comes to income deterioration and waltz. So, you know, the weighted average lease terms and things like that is the implication that the old extended pretend strategy, which, you know, another blast from the past from 2008 and the years after that is the implication that that just won't work in the current environment, that at some point you're not going to be able to refinance or there will be some sort of catalyst on the income side that makes it impossible. Yeah, that that is a good distinction.
30:40The extended pretend it worked for a simple reason. everybody understood it was a temporary credit market challenge. You had otherwise cash flowing properties. And if the credit market simply stabilized, given that there was some high quality cash flow, you'd be able to refinance at reasonable rates. In fact, the folks who made a lot of money into the recovery period were folks who came in, took buildings that were otherwise cash flowing, just with bad debt situations, repositioned the debt, put an appropriate debt structure in there, and then ride the wave of recovery as the debt market stabilized.
31:14This time through, you don't have that same opportunity of healthy cash flowing properties. You see properties that have uncertainty around the income moving forward. So it's just not going to work out the same way. We track distressed asset sales and we don't have a lot of distressed asset sales yet. Again, everybody kind of sees this coming, but it's a slow-moving, sticky market. And everybody knows there's some distressed sales coming, but it hasn't hit in a meaningful way yet. But when we do see some of the distressed sales, when we disaggregate who was buying, it's a different type of buyer of the distress we've seen so far compared to the aftermath of the financial crisis.
31:59The aftermath of the financial crisis, there's a bunch of suits from New York from private equity firms flying out to cities across the United States, buying up these cash flowing assets, repositioning the debt and flying home and just collecting a big return. Nice work if you can get it. Absolutely. And everybody sees that and thinks, hey, I'm going to be just like those folks this cycle. But the folks who have been buying these properties so far are local developer, owner, operator types. It's people know how to swing a hammer. And that tells me that the distress is really more fundamental distress.
32:34It's not a cash-flowing building in Nashville with a high-quality credit tenant. It's a dead mall outside of Columbus with burnt orange tile and brown carpet from the 70s. And somebody has to reposition that. And it's going to take somebody who has relationships with local regulators. You know, every zoning board wants to get their hands involved in that to be able to change the use and bring it into the modern economy again. And so that takes a lot of elbow grease, both literally from the physical side and then figuratively just talking with local zoning boards and getting changes and entitlements and land use regulation.
33:15There's a CRE guy I follow on Twitter who goes by the handle repositioning play. That's what that means. It just clicked to me that that's what that means, that it's like some mall is like, oh, maybe this could be like residential or maybe this could be like a big paintball sort of like thing. But that's what that means, that you have to identify the opportunity to like make it something other than it was. Yeah. And with those malls, a lot of malls that are positioned well relative to transit opportunities for highways. And so some of them would be great for logistics and local distribution activity.
33:49However, that flies in the face of local zoning issues where local city leaders feel that, oh, it's too beneath them. It's not bougie. It's not a consumption area. Plus, we're not a low-class industrial town. We want the mall. We want Bloomingdale's because we're high-end. But the reality is the market doesn't believe that. And it's going to take a long time to get some local city leaders to kind of understand where they really sit. But there's another issue that in many states we have that those local city leaders want the retail because it generates more tax revenue without them having to tax residents as much.
34:33And so that's the other reason that it's a sticky issue keeping the market from converting the space to what it really needs to be. So this is really fascinating. Just this idea that the buyers we're seeing show up in some of these distressed is not the people who just know how to like, you know, do a spreadsheet. How to flip it. Yeah. And that people who actually have to under have these sort of are sort of like concrete connections. But I want to get back to some of the specific bank questions and specifically like, you know, let's say we talk about CBD office, some of these areas that are income stressed.
35:06Like of that debt out there, how solid are the numbers in terms of like how much is bank? How much is private credit funds? Like how is that broken down? I mean, the originations. We're tracking originations. Okay. We don't have a good measure of the stock. We have some estimates of maturities, you know, given when we know all the loans were originated and the kind of terms that were in place. Measures of stock, they get tricky because some loans, you know, it might default and we're not going to hear about that. So I can give a perspective on the share of originations. And in the boom period when interest rates were so low and everyone was excited about the fact that there was some yield on offer in commercial real estate, those debt funds were around 13 % of originations.
35:53And given that they had typically short terms associated with those loans, that's going to be a significant component of the maturities in the near term. 13 % of the market was high LTV, low interest rate, and very few covenants from these aggressive lenders. Could be an interesting situation with those deals. So just on this topic, how do you see banks and private investors actually hedging their CRE exposure at this moment in time, if they're doing it at all? Because my impression of the space was it was always kind of a difficult one to hedge or go short. And you do have synthetic instruments like the CMBX, which is a derivatives index tied to not that many CMBS properties, I think, which makes it sometimes a not perfect one-for-one hedge for this kind of exposure.
36:50Yeah, hedging the commercial real estate market has been, it's been the white whale for many folks in the industry over the last 15 years. The firm I'm with now, they bought this company, Real Capital Analytics, back in 2021. And Real Capital Analytics had been one of the folks trying to get a real estate derivatives index going based on our commercial property price index. We had licensed it out to a third party that was trying to get that going. There are a few other folks trying to get that going. The trade organization, NACREF, some folks are trying to trade derivatives on that. So there were a lot of folks trying to get that going, but it never really took off.
37:26And just they couldn't get enough buyers and sellers on opposite sides of a transaction to make any of that work. Again, the market is highly predictable because there's so many sticky elements in the performance of the market that if you just, again, forget about econometrics and forecasting, just very simple things, talking to leasing brokers, any deal that's going to be done in the next six months, they're working on it right now. And so you can get a sense of just future demand that way. So those kinds of challenges, everybody saw that. So it's just been hard to make a product like that. Wait, can I just press you on that point?
38:02Because since we're, this is a fun episode for me, because it's bringing up a lot of 2008 flashbacks. But if you wanted to go short residential real estate pre-2008, you use the ABX. Why is the commercial real estate market so different from the residential market that putting on that big commercial real estate short seems to be much more difficult? Yeah. I haven't gotten into that as much, the comparison in that direction. There are fundamental differences in the two product types. There's much more of a subsidized finance side on the residential market. The residential market is vastly larger than the commercial market.
38:46There's many more single-family homes out there. So just more information availability becomes an issue. You can do a lot more. You go in the academic literature, there's all kinds of folks doing stuff on residential real estate because that's where the data is. There's fewer folks doing work on commercial real estate because it's just harder to get information. Interesting. Okay. I've been working in the sector since 1996, trying to help generate more transparency, more information, just better data sets for the sector. And as much as we've improved since that time, when I talk to my public markets colleagues over at MSCI, they're like, well, you guys are doing okay.
39:27Well, all right. So again, on this sort of like bank question, part of the reason we're even having this discussion again is because in the wake of SVB, people are like, what are the what are the landmines, I guess, maybe that these banks could be stepping out or something? What's lurking on the asset side of the bank balance sheets? And so when we sort of like and I imagine there's no one model bank, obviously, they're all going to be different. But when it comes to the various things that a theoretical bank could have on its balance sheet, you know, treasuries, agency, MBS, you know, some sort of whatever it is.
40:05Like, how significant is this really in terms of percentage of their own exposure to commercial real estate? Or how do you think about answering that question? Or how do you think about trying to dive into where this lies? Diving into that, the FDIC call sheets have a lot of information about some of the exposures, sort of the stock of loans of different entities. And my colleague, Tamar, up at Columbia, he did a study, I think it was released on March 13th of all days, and estimated that maybe 200 banks face some challenges in that direction. But what do we mean? Because that's a range of things, right?
40:43is like they're going to like take losses, they're going to have write downs versus like people are worried about like insolvencies, et cetera. So like how seriously do you view the stress not to the commercial real estate market, but to the banking system from the exposure that they have? Sorry, can I just tack on to the end of that? What do loan loss provisions actually look like for CRE? Because you would expect that, you know, again, this has been sort of on people's radar for some time. Yeah, I'm not sure what the loan loss provisions were. I don't have insight to that. I just know when they made the loans sort of the high, the terms there, this is a challenge that is out there for the sector.
41:22As much as we've tried, there are still many things that are known unknowns. It's still an opaque sector on performance. I'm in the office every day. And part of that is every day I use it as a base of operations and I'm going around the city, you know, have a few meetings every week just talking to people because you pick up so much information that's not in a database. It's not easily accessible because you just have a conversation with somebody. You get a few observations and sort of a sense of direction momentum. It is a challenging sector in that direction. And just in terms of like. The seriousness.
41:59The seriousness that a CRE weakness poses to banks themselves, like what is your judgment on that? Everybody saw what happened with Silicon Valley Bank. They had all this RMBS on their balance sheet. It seemed like a safe product. It was throwing off yield. But in a rising interest rate environment, the asset value needs to be written down. Other entities have the same kind of thing on their balance sheet. The question that I would be digging into is how many of them have actually taken those write-downs so far, and have they been able to replace that capital in other ways? Before the bank run started at SVB, they were trying to bring in other assets.
42:41They were trying to raise capital to shore up their balance sheet. What I'd be looking at is, have other banks been ahead of the curve there? Have they been able to start to step that up? And where do they stand? That's what I would be looking for. Because anybody who held those kind of securities, realistically, if they're market to market, they're not worth what they were back when interest rates were so low. And this is the challenge of the medicine that the Fed has to deal with inflation. The last time the Fed raised the Fed funds rate at such a rapid pace was in the early 1970s. They had to put the pedal to the metal here to fight inflation.
43:23but it had unintended consequences. Back in the 70s, you didn't have these complicated structured products like RMBS. It wasn't something that banks held. And the financial environment was largely a bank and a life company market. You didn't have debt funds in the United States. They had a structure like that in the UK, but not here as much. And you didn't have, CMBS didn't exist at all. So you didn't have complicated products on the balance sheet. So when rates were raised, you didn't have as much of an immediate shock to the banks. This time through, I don't know if they were thinking about the fact that you have a more complicated financial environment today than the early 1970s with more unintended consequences.
44:10What are you hearing from the banks themselves? I mean, give us some color because as you pointed out multiple times, this is a very opaque market. It is difficult to get a handle on whether or not People are writing stuff down, what the capitulation point actually is. That is something that I always like. Like I noted, walking around the city, just go visit clients, talk to people. You pick up a lot that way. Since mid-March, it's been very quiet. No meetings and just no conversations with our clients there or with the regulators either. Not that I didn't want to talk with them. It's just they've been busy elsewhere.
44:48Interesting. Yeah. One of my favorite forms of sell-side research is when they send all the analysts to go shopping at a mall. But now it's going to be when they send analysts to just walk around downtown New York and observe how many people are going in and out of office buildings. Yeah, like how many people are in line at a Starbucks or just like those charts, which I'm sure like, and everybody's still monitoring those like MTA usage. I just want to go back again, and I think outside of the sort of non-office, non-central business district real estate, I guess malls, there are some issues. But by and large, is this still more about a rates pressure than it is an income pressure?
45:28Is there income stress showing up in other parts? Yeah, the income stress has mostly been a story of properties where the previous economic justification from is evaporating. okay malls we've been dealing with for a long time right like that's a pre-covid story for a long time and offices now are kind of where malls used to be where everybody saw there was a change they weren't sure how long it was going to take but it's going to be there offices today are in some cases much like the malls in the past but you know the other property types it's not as extreme on sort of the income uncertainty some elements of hotels with some of the convention center locations still not where they were in expensive urban markets.
46:15You don't see as much activity in some of those. Although the nature of it has changed, much more tourism and talking with hotel experts, there's sort of been a change in the patterns of daily room rates because there's many more folks who are not doing the come in the middle of the week for a conference or to see clients. There's many more tourists. So it's changed the nature of some of those hotels. But it's largely all about the change in the economic justification of some of the assets. Jim Costello, thank you so much for coming in. This is such a big topic and this was so helpful in terms of understanding the various dynamics out there.
46:56Yeah, that was really great. Thank you. Appreciate you coming on online. Yeah, great to be here.
47:12Tracy, I thought that was really great. Obviously a lot there, but this idea that like for the most part, and this speaks to why we really need to do a sort of like Office to Resi episode soon and the challenge is there, that this is not going to be a situation in which the money is accrued to like people who know how to like read a spreadsheet or enter numbers into a model and sit behind a computer in New York, but someone who knows about like, actual construction and zoning and relationships, I think is like a really interesting, yeah, this is not the last four. Absolutely. And also the parallels between where shopping malls were in, say, 2015.
47:50And I mean, I remember writing those stories from a CMBS perspective. You know, what are we going to do with all the shopping malls? And some of them are going to become like multifamily living centers and things like that. Yeah. And the parallels with the office space now. And the other thing I thought was really interesting was this idea, and I'd never thought of it before, but the idea that the local authorities might want to hold out for retail because they get higher tax income than for resi, that was really interesting to me. And then also just the point about why extend and pretend won't work in that environment, in an environment where the cash flow, the income is actually in doubt.
48:31It's not just a matter of refinancing again. You know, I think obviously for understandable reasons, there are these concerns about regional bank exposure to this space. But I do think that like people need to remember that there is like a diversity of what's meant by commercial real estate and that like a lot of like the risky stuff, like the sort of like fast money, the riskiest stuff, especially in this sort of like low interest rate period with like the worst covenants or the sort of like the worst investor protections. The fastest time to refi was by the sort of like private debt funds was a really interesting point.
49:10Yeah. And like the holder, people who have money invested in those private debt funds, like they're probably not going to do great. I would assume they're going to like take some hits. But like that seems better than like having all those like losses be borne by like the banks themselves. They have these like sort of like key infrastructure. Well, I mean, the good news is, to some extent, that's what a lot of the recent regulation was trying to encourage, which was, you know, banks are more conservative on risky CRE. And there was a lot of recognition that was an area of worry in recent years and that some of that risk would be pushed out into non banking entities such as large debt funds.
49:51But I guess now we get to see whether or not that was a good strategy. Yeah, and then still the point that part of the reason the regional banks have this exposure is because they're less burdened than the large banks in terms of the types of risks that they can take. So clearly still risks out there for multiple parties. I do want to do an episode, though, on why commercial real estate seems to be so difficult to short or to hedge. Because this has been a sort of, it's a little geeky or wonky, but this has been a perennial talking point in the industry. At various points in time, you see people come out with very creative ways of going short.
50:30But there hasn't been an obvious industry standard other than CMBX, which is definitely not a perfect hedge for a long time. So we should do an episode on that. Yeah, that is interesting because I think people just sort of imagine that like, and I remember this even going back to 2008, 2009, like just with like credit default swabs. Yeah. And people like imagine you just like go like log into your brokerage, right? And like buy a CDS or like whatever, as if like it's like buying a stock. It's like, why don't you put on a hedge? It's like, well, was someone willing to sell you a hedge for this?
51:00Yeah, it's a very two-sided market. It's sort of this idea that like there is just always a hedge out there that someone could have bought. Sort of like this sort of naive fantasy about how these markets work. Right. Or the idea that everyone has like an ISDA agreement up their sleeve. Yeah. OK. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at The Stalwart. Follow our guest, Jim Costello. He's at Jim Costello C-R-E. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at CarmenArmin and DashBennett at DashBot.
51:37Follow all of the Bloomberg podcasts under the handle at podcasts. And for more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash OddLots. We have transcripts, a blog, tracing, I have a newsletter. And hang out with other listeners on the OddLots Discord. It's really fun. I'm spending more and more time there. People talk about all the topics we discuss on the show. Go to Discord.gg slash OddLots. 24-7 Odd Lodge channel. What could be better? Thanks for listening.
52:35This is Rob Parker from The Odd Couple with Rob Parker and Kelvin Washington. Toyota-thon is on. So stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year-end deals on cars, trucks, and SUVs known for their legendary reliability like the stylish and efficient Camry, the ready-for-anything RAV4, or check out a rough and rugged Tacoma or Tundra, all with great finance and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more. Toyota, let's go places. Hey, Ryan Reynolds here. Wishing you a very happy half-off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50 % off unlimited.
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From the publisher
In the last month or so, two macro risks have become top of mind for investors. One is the stability of regional banks. The other is the weakness in the commercial real estate market. On some level, they're separate stories, but they're also linked, since regional banks tend to do more commercial real estate lending than larger, national banks. Of course, the links are complicated. CRE is not a monolith — and banks are just one source of financing for CRE projects, alongside private credit funds, insurance companies and other sources of capital. On this episode of the podcast, we speak with Jim Costello, chief economist for real assets at MSCI, about what to watch for.
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