…wait until you see what’s in the cards for commercial real estate.

That’s right, the next train wreck will be in commercial real estate. Couldn’t be worse than last year’s residential market crash? That remains to be seen. But it’s coming soon, probably as early as the second quarter of next year, and there’s nothing that can prevent it. The government will intervene, trying desperately to delay the day of reckoning, and may even succeed. For a while. But make no mistake about it, that train is going off the tracks no matter what.

Every part of the sector – from multifamily apartment buildings to retail shopping centers, suburban office buildings, industrial facilities, and hotels – has accumulated a huge amount of defaulted or nonperforming paper. It’s an impossible, swaying structure that cannot long stand.

Just ask Andy Miller.

Andy is one of the most knowledgeable people around when it comes to commercial real estate. Co-founder of the Miller Fishman Group of Denver, he has spent twenty years buying and developing apartment communities, shopping centers, office buildings, and warehouses throughout the country. He’s also worked extensively – especially lately – with asset managers and special servicers (those who handle commercial mortgage-backed securities, or CMBS) from insurance companies, conduits, and the biggest banks in the U.S., advising them on default scenarios, helping them develop realistic pricing structures, and making hold or sell recommendations.

It isn’t easy. Commercial real estate sales are off a staggering 82% in 2009, compared with 2008, and last year was worse than ’07. No one is selling at depressed prices, but it hardly matters as there are no buyers, either because they’re afraid of the market or can’t meet more stringent loan requirements. Two years ago, the value of all commercial real estate in the U.S. was about $6.5 trillion. Against that was laid $3-3.5 trillion in loans. The latter figure hasn’t changed much. But the former has sunk like a bar of lead in the lake, so that now between half and two-thirds of those loans will have to be written down, Andy estimates.

“If the banks had to take that hit all at once, there wouldn’t be any banks,” he says.

And it’s actually worse than that. As even average citizens became aware during the subprime meltdown, loans in recent years were bundled into exotic financial vehicles that could be sold and resold, a class generically known as conduits. These commercial mortgage-backed securities, while less well known than their cousins built upon home loans, are nonetheless ubiquitous.

Three guesses who were among the significant buyers of CMBS. If you said banks, banks, and more banks, you got it. Thus these folks are sitting not only on their own malperforming loans, but on a whole lot of everyone else’s toxic junk, too.

This is how bad conduits are: A 3% default rate last year jumped to 6% in 2009 and is expected to double again, to 12%, in 2010. An entity that takes a 12% hit to its portfolio – and this includes countless banks, pension and annuity funds, international institutional investors, and others – is in deep, deep trouble.

The real tsunami is coming, probably in the second quarter of 2010, Andy estimates. Because that’s when banks will have to start preparing for the wave of mortgages that were written near the market top and are maturing in 2011-12. Unlike home loans, commercial loans tend to be relatively short-term in nature (average 5-7 years), because – outside of apartment building loans backed by Fannie or Freddie – there are no government programs to subsidize longer-term ones. These guys mature in bunches.

According to a recent Deutsche Bank presentation, the delinquency rate on commercial loans as of the end of 2Q09 was greater than 4%. Of these, they expect that north of 70% will not qualify for refinancing. Imagine what will happen to the estimated $2 trillion in commercial mortgages that mature between now and 2013.

And even that is not the end of it. There’s a second huge wave on the way in 2015-16.

Problem is, instead of trying to meet this inevitable challenge head on, asset managers have decided to believe in such phantoms as the tooth fairy, honesty at the Fed, and an economic turnaround powerful enough to bail them all out. De Nile is not just a river in Egypt.

To be fair, it’s difficult to envision what an intelligent, aggressive response would look like, given the breadth and depth of the crisis, and the lack of resources available to deal with it. Miller recently met with a group of asset managers from a number of different, prominent banks. They reported that they’re completely overwhelmed and can’t even begin to cope with the sheer volume of problem loans on their calendar. It’s so bad that they’re now dealing with some borrowers who haven’t paid a cent in a year and a half.

What do you do if, as Andy thinks is the case, 85-90% of the entire commercial real estate market is under water relative to its financing? What happens to a property when its value drops way below the loan, a seller can’t get enough money to get out, a buyer can’t raise enough money to get in, and the bank can’t afford to foreclose? Simple. It just sits there, carried along on the bank’s books at some inflated “mark to fantasy” price that makes the institution’s balance sheet look passable. The industry even has a catchphrase for the situation: “A rolling loan gathers no moss.”

In the case of a retail store, a bankrupt tenant walks away. Andy looked at just the part of Phoenix where his firm does business and found 90 vacant big box stores, with an aggregate floor space of 8 million square feet. If Christmas season is as lackluster as cash-strapped consumers are likely to make it, there will be many others to follow.

The hotel business is terrible. Overbuilding based upon travelers who went into debt to finance lavish vacations is taking its toll on tourist destinations. At the same time, business travel has seriously contracted. Flights into Las Vegas, which caters to both, have been slashed so much that even if every seat on every remaining flight were filled and visitors stayed for an average number of days, the hotels still couldn’t break even. In industry parlance, banks are now engaged in “extend and pretend,” i.e., giving hotels three- to six-month loan extensions in the hope that things will somehow improve in the near future.

Office space is doing okay in central business districts, but not faring well elsewhere. Some estimates tab the national office vacancy rate at over 16.5%, compared with 12.6% in January 2008. It exceeds 20% in parts of Atlanta and San Diego, and in many places in between.

Multifamily apartment buildings – and the very creaky Fannie and Freddie are carrying a load of them – may be the next to topple. As values deteriorate and landlords are faced with loans coming due, there is no incentive to fix whatever goes wrong. If, for example, you have a $10 million loan maturing in two years, and the property value has declined to $6 million, why would you spend half a million to fix leaky roofs? The question answers itself. Yet, as capital spending needs are not attended to, the apartments deteriorate. Which leads to working-class tenants replaced by meth labs. Which leads to even lower property values. And so on. In the end, when the banks are forced to take possession, they will be left with either expensive repair jobs, or the cost of demolition and a total write-off.

As the overall commercial real estate crisis escalates, the banks will do the same thing they did last year: run to the government, palms outstretched.

How will Washington respond? Good question. On the one hand, further bailouts will further infuriate the public. But on the other, the political sentiment will be that allowing the banks to fail will have even more dire consequences.

The Fed has already tried to let some of the relentlessly building pressure out of the balloon through TALF (Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility). But that hasn’t worked, because TALF only backs the most senior, creditworthy bonds in a CMBS pool. Those aren’t the problem. The problem is the junior notes no one wants.

In order to increase market liquidity and get conduits moving again, the government will likely be forced to create a guarantee program similar to the FHA, Miller thinks, whereby short-term money (on the order of 5-7 years) is made available. Will that just push our problems five to seven years down the road? Quite possibly. But what is being purchased is time, the only thing left to buy. The hope, of course, is that it’s enough time – for the real estate market to stabilize, prices to return to more “normal” levels, and the world to turn all hunky dory.

Rock, meet hard place. Let all the troubled banks fail, and the consequences will range from some excruciating but short-term pain, to a plunge into full-bore depression. Prop them up with yet more newly printed fiat money, and anything from high to hyperinflation will inevitably result, along with the possibility of extending the problem well into the next decade.

Both are frightening prospects. We don’t want either, but realistically, we’re going to get one or the other. Let’s be clear, it won’t be the end of the world. However, it will be the end of the world as we know it. That makes it imperative to prepare for the new one that’s coming.

The editors of The Casey Report, supported by real estate pro Andy Miller, have been warning of the coming commercial real estate debacle since September 2008. This one’s rather easy to time – because they know when the loans will come due. And as subscribers can testify, accurately predicting big trends is the forte of Doug Casey and his expert team. To learn how you can profit from making the trend your friend, click here.

Chinese property sales are up over 60% so far this year, the nation’s National Bureau of Statistics proclaimed yesterday. That puts the housing bubble here to shame. We’ve heard a bunch of nosebleed data points come outta there in the last few weeks… check these out:

• New loan issuance has tripled in the first half of 2009, to $1.1 trillion. That’s more than half of the entire Chinese GDP over the same period.
• 95% of those loans went to state-owned enterprises or provincial entities
• The Shanghai Composite is up 79% year to date, the best major market performance in the world
• Stocks on the Shanghai Composite trade for 35.4 times earnings, double that of the MSCI Emerging Markets index
• M2 money supply rose over 28.5% in the first half of the year
• The seven largest bond sales in the world this year were domestic transactions in China.

Damn near everything is up dramatically in China in 2009… except exports. Strangely, we don’t hear a lot of concern that the backbone of their economy has contracted 23% since this time last year.

“The Chinese government realizes,” adds Dan Amoss, “that its stimulus spending and pressure on banks to expand lending is inflating a massive bubble in the Chinese stock and property markets. The problem with unsustainable economy activity is, of course, that it must eventually end.

“But for now, the Chinese have much more room to borrow and inflate than the United States (which has spent the last few decades doing so). Eventually, the market will cut them off. The end will not be pretty, and at some point in the future, shorting Chinese stocks may be one of the best short-selling opportunities in history.

“In the meantime, it makes no sense to bet against China. The Communist government has proven very efficient at stealing the resources of its people (via inflation and taxation) and channeling them into whatever infrastructure project they deem necessary.

“This process could end next week or next year.”

Dan’s keeping an eye on China, but right now his focus is on a very well-known bank on the other side of the Pacific. He believes this major financial player will soon have to cut their dividend… crushing their stock price.

Source: China Bubble Version 2.0

This has been a tough quarter for companies. Compared to last year’s second quarter, profit is down roughly 31 percent and revenue is down even more. Wall Street thought it was going to be even worse. So in one of the worst quarters ever, the market has rallied.

Investors learn all the wrong lessons from a rally like this. Nothing about it makes sense. The smallest companies are outgunning the biggest one. The most heavily shorted stocks are doing better than the least shorted stocks. The companies with the worst analyst ratings are outshining the ones with the best ratings. Everything about this rally is backwards.

Over the past 37 years – from 1972 to 2009 – these “best of breed” companies have made shareholders 2.3 times more money than the stock market as a whole. For every $100 you made from the stock market, you would have made $230 from these “best of breed” companies.

That’s not just slightly outperforming the market. That’s lapping the market and then some. And it’s even more impressive when you take into account everything this period covered. It’s been an eventful 37 years of embargoes, stagflation, a savings & loan crisis, an Asian economic crisis, a Russian national debt default, a near collapse of the Mexican peso, 9/11, two gulf wars, the bankruptcy of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund, the dotcom rise and fall, a bursting of the housing bubble, credit bubble and spending bubble. Forgive me if I’ve left some “minor stuff” out like the fall of the “Iron Curtain” and the rise of China.

Through all this, these companies gave their shareholders a steady and rising stream of revenue and a return that, as I’ve said, was more than 2.3 times what the markets gave. Who wouldn’t want that?

Everybody would. And that’s a big problem for all those mutual funds which don’t touch these companies … and for the hyper-active Wall Street press which makes a fuss over a dozen things every day but somehow misses the biggest story of all…

The existence of a class of companies which know how to put ever-increasing amounts of cash into the pockets of their shareholders, year in and year out, decade in and decade out.

Almost as bizarre as our junk rally are dividend-paying companies that can do no wrong. The ones strong enough and confident enough to raise dividends are going up in price. And the ones that are cutting dividends? Many of them are going up too.

Shareholders have recently been accepting smaller checks without protest and without selling their shares. They are evidently willing to take the hit today so the company can grow profits tomorrow. It’s easier to do when investors think that some kind of recovery is around the corner. If that recovery doesn’t materialize, these shareholders will be showing much less forgiveness to dividend cutters. I don’t want to own these companies when that happens.

If I were an investor in any of those companies, I’d sell my shares right away. The whole point of investing in the “best of breed” companies is that you get paid no matter what.

Everybody is cutting costs, the strong and weak companies alike. But not all dividend companies are cutting their dividends. Just slightly more than half are these days. It pays to invest in the dividend hikers, not so with the cutters. Let other investors be forced to rely on a recovery to reverse their portfolio losses.

You should be and can be making money even if the economy remains weak. As long as there are “best of breed” companies still raising their dividends, there’s no reason why you should sacrifice your pay “for the good of the company.”

The scary thing (for us and the Fed) is that low-interest rates aren’t speeding up the recovery. People aren’t willing to borrow. And banks aren’t willing to lend. The amount of money floating around the economy is pretty stagnant. The Fed should be pretty discouraged. They have $2 trillion on their balance sheet. And all they have to show for it are some banks which should have gone under but are instead giving its employees million-dollar bonuses.

Dividend companies are getting a little respect again. They may even have become the “new fad” according to the UK’s Telegraph. Here’s the money quote…

Few professional investors are banking on a return to the super-charged capital gains we have seen from equities in the past. Rather, the new fad is for companies capable of delivering reliable sources of income. Historically, dividends have been responsible for more than half the return on equities. In the more risk-averse environment which is the new norm it may be rather more than that.

But why be satisfied with just a “reliable source of income” when you could get income which is both reliable and growing. Perhaps the Telegraph doesn’t realize that with “best of breed” companies, you can have your cake and eat it too. But the Telegraph isn’t the only newspaper or media outlet that doesn’t “get it.”

Nobody is talking about these companies providing reliable revenue to shareholders for decades (yes, I said decades) and increasing their dividends at rates of 25-40 percent every year. Yes, I said 25-40 percent every year.

Do the math. A company raising its cash payments to you by 25 percent every year will double the money it pays you every three years! If you’re getting $10,000 in cash every year from a company now, in six years you’ll be getting $40,000.

These aren’t junk bonds. They’re not risky derivatives. They don’t depend on a bull market. These payments come from some of the safest and strongest companies in the market. When companies provide rising cash payments for decades and generate plenty of cash with above average profit margins, they qualify for “best of breed” status.

Actually, some people out there do “get it.” One of them is Hersh Cohen. He has managed the Legg Mason Partners Appreciation fund for the past 30 years. Over these three decades, his fund has done better than the S&P 500, the dividend-company benchmark index and the average return for large-capitalization stock funds. Cohen, who holds a doctorate in psychology, says he focuses on companies with “superior balance sheets and rising dividends.”

Cohen says his academic training helps him when the market goes to extremes. During such times he likes to go against the flow, cutting back when the market is euphoric and increasing his bets when others panic “and stuff is being given away.”

I’m not a fan of mutual funds. I think they’re terrible instruments, trapping investors into very narrow styles of investment long past the time when those styles made a buck. And I don’t think mutual fund managers are the sharpest tools in the investment shed. So when I see an exception, I try to point him out. Cohen is an exception.

If you’re interested in doubling your money every three years with very little risk, there’s only one way to do it. Invest in “best of breed” companies.

To your investing success,
Andrew

Source: Why ‘Best of Breed’ Investing Is No Passing Fad

“[We] must control the risk of real estate loans,” said a mystery banker. “In the first half of the year, our country’s banking loans expanded rapidly… but the loans growth has led to accumulated risks also increasing.” Our man of the moment said his banking sector had become “not prudent and impulsive” in issuing loans for new housing projects, many of which have falsified their capital levels to meet current standards. He urged lenders to “strengthen risk management” right way, before they loan themselves into poor credit positions.

So who is he? Robert Shiller, who just recently suggested another housing bubble could be in the mix? Or maybe some vintage Ben Bernanke, circa 2007? Nope… Liu Mingkang, the head of China’s version of the FDIC, said the above over the weekend at a conference in Beijing. China bulls take heed.

And at the risk of belaboring the obvious — he’s Chinese. We know what kind of exigency would get an American regulator to speak out against a bubble in the making. We imagine it’s far more politically dangerous for a member of the Chinese government to publicly go against the grain.
Back in America, the housing market rejoices: Housing starts climbed an unexpected 3.6% in June. According to the latest from the Commerce Department, builders broke ground on new homes at an annual rate of 582,000 in June, well above the Street’s expectations and the “best” month for housing starts since November. Curiously, single-family homes led the way, with a 14% building boom from the month before. That’s the biggest one-month gain since 2004.

Of course, this is a “signal that the housing market was improving” in June, as The New York Times suggests. But we dug up a longer-term chart of housing starts this morning that didn’t inspire as much confidence. Starts may have come up from the deep blue abyss, but we’re yet to emerge from uncharted waters

And who says more housing starts are a good thing? We may be market simpletons, but we’re under the impression home prices are falling because demand is exceptionally weak and supply is exceptionally high. So explain to us again how adding more inventory to the 3.8 million existing homes on the market helps stop the bleeding.
Over 1.53 million homeowners were in the foreclosure process in the first half of 2009. That’s an all-time high, said RealtyTrac late last week — and up 9% from the last half of 2008 and up 15% from the same time last year.

Around 1.9 million individual properties are in some form of foreclosure, or one in every 84 U.S. properties. And we’re adding new homes at an annual rate of 582,000? Really, we must be missing something this morning.
The stock market is still giddy over recent earnings surprises. The S&P 500 finished last week up 7% after companies like Intel, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, IBM and Citigroup all beat earnings.

Today the market looks poised to finish in the black again. CIT, the commercial lender we discussed Friday looks like it might live to fight another day. The lender managed a last-minute debt-equity deal with bondholders that will give them another $3 billion to play with. (Look for this crisis to repeat in a couple weeks.) Still, the market has dodged a bullet, and is up about 0.5% as we write.
“In last week’s market, you could almost feel portfolio managers reacting to the prospect of missing a rally,”writes Dan Amoss, a former money manager himself. “Career risk drives many irrational investing decisions. And missing out on a rally is a cardinal sin for portfolio managers. This goes a long way toward explaining this week’s rally.

“The consensus seems to be looking for a return to something resembling the environment before the credit crisis. They’ll be waiting for a long time. Sure, there are still lots of wealthy people. But the essence of the financial crisis has to do with most consumers and businesses stretching their budgets and capital spending plans in unsustainable fashion. The next few years will reverse this trend, and we’ll continue to see economic development in emerging markets maintain pressure on commodity prices.

“Mr. Market is now testing the conviction of the bears. But through the rest of 2009, the momentum favors the bears. The stock market is far below its peak, but this is justified by long-term fundamentals. In fact, the recent rally has priced in very rosy earnings for many sectors and stocks, including our short ideas.

“Remain patient with your short positions. This rally will end soon enough, probably by the time the fourth branch of government — the mega banks — are done reporting their paper trading profits and we learn more about the bleak outlook for earnings in the real economy.”
Four more banks failed this weekend. Two in California, one in Georgia and another in South Dakota got the FDIC kibosh late Friday. That makes 57 failed financials for 2009, at an FDIC cost of over $13.4 billion.
After a long flight from Baltimore to Vancouver, we were able to move through Canadian immigration last night with relative ease, but many Czechs and Mexicans were suddenly not welcome. Just another sign of the times… the Canadian government recently legislated rules that prohibit any Mexican or Czechoslovakian from entering Canada without a visa.

Canadians say political and economic strife in both nations has caused a wave of immigrants seeking refugee status, many of which are bogus. So the Canadian government drafted the law last Monday and enacted it on Tuesday… Canadian diplomats in Mexico City have been ripping their hair out ever since:

The scrum for last-minute visas at the
Canadian embassy in Mexico City

Heh, nothing stokes a free market like sudden and severe travel restrictions.
We’re in Canada this week for our Investment Symposium (more below in the P.S.) and got a visceral reminder of the loonie’s recent strength. 98 cents to the U.S. dollar at the airport currency exchange! No thanks… we’ll wait till we stumble upon a bank.

The Canadian dollar is once again rapidly approaching parity. The ol’ loonie is officially at 90 cents today, up a full cent since Friday and about a nickel in July. Most of the loonie’s strength can be attributed to dollar weakness. Since breaking through that historic barrier at 80 last week, the dollar index has been in steady decline. It’s at 78.9 today, nearly a two-month low.
Oil’s recent stabilization has been helping out the Canadian dollar, too. Light sweet crude traded as high as $64 a barrel today, a $4 bump from last week’s low.
Gold is performing nicely as the U.S. dollar falls. The spot price is up $20 from Friday’s low, to $955 an ounce.
“The first thing to understand,” writes Mr. Byron King, “as an old geology professor at Harvard once told me, is that ‘gold is where you find it.’ And the second thing to understand is that no matter where you look, gold is hard to find — and getting harder.

“In the past decade, gold-related exploration efforts and expenditures have increased dramatically. I’ve seen numbers adding up to tens of billions of dollars poured by mining companies into gold exploration.

“But despite the best efforts of the global mining industry, world gold production has DECREASED since early in this decade. Take a look at the chart below, depicting world gold production 1850-2008.

“I love this chart. I could spend all day discussing it. For example, look at the very steep rise in gold output during the 1930s. That was during the depths of the worldwide Great Depression. In both the U.S./Canada (blue area), and the rest of the world (gray area), people were digging more and more gold. The Soviets (purple area) increased their gold output too, courtesy of Joseph Stalin and his Gulag. Desperate times call for desperate measures, I suppose. Will that sort of history repeat this time around?”

If it does, will you be ready? Check out Byron’s favorite gold plays here.
“To back up Mr. Shiller,” writes a reader in response toRobert Shiller’s call that the new wave of “cheap” homes might cause another housing bubble, “I was Skyping a friend in Phoenix last week, and they were all excited that they just bought a foreclosed home for a ‘steal,’ with an 80/20 FNMA-backed mortgage. Not five minutes later, I read the 5 article regarding that the Phoenix market is still dropping. I still don’t think that many people (my friend included) get it that prices can still drop, and that just a 10% drop wipes out almost all their equity, since they will have to pay some sort of 6% commission. I myself have seen a greater than 20% drop on my very expensive house in Atlanta, costing me hundreds of thousands of dollars.

”My wife is an agent, and she has counted three (yes, three) home sales in our area in six months. Two of them were foreclosures. The unsold homes continue to accumulate, and the market is moving toward ‘the only sale is a short sale.’ I live in Augusta, and my prayers go to my neighbor who was just transferred up to an area outside of Detroit. I can see the wealth destruction personally, and can only imagine the nationwide ramifications.”

Source:   China’s Bubble Warning, New Home Paradox, Gold Production Sea Change, Vancouver Updates and More!

REITs are still in the early stages of a huge deleveraging cycle that will last for years, which means that the REITs that concentrate on commercial real estate may be a deceptively dangerous asset class.

Our story begins with the massive credit bubble – and related housing bubble – of the last several years. These twin bubbles powered a dramatic rise in consumer spending. Some significant portion of commercial real estate sprouted up to serve and satisfy this artificial demand. From the top to bottom of the U.S. economy, easy access to credit during the last several years powered excess consumption – and a frenzy of knock-on commercial ventures.

Accordingly, shopping boutiques popped up everywhere, along with restaurants, real estate offices, home-furnishing stores, art galleries, etc. All of these enterprises unwittingly relied on credit-fueled demand, and believed that this demand was “normal.”

But now that credit has disappeared from the U.S. economy, thousands of businesses are discovering that they cannot survive the new normal – the one that relies on actual paychecks and savings, NOT credit. And so, one by one, business doors are closing and the empty commercial spaces are piling up.

“The severity of the recession is turning some malls that were once viewed as viable into potential casualties,” the Wall Street Journal recently observed. “‘Any mall that’s sitting on life support is probably going to get its plug pulled as the economy stalls,’ says Michael Glimcher, chairman and CEO of Glimcher Realty Trust, which owns 23 U.S. properties, including Eastland Mall in Charlotte.”

The distress in the commercial real estate market would be serious, even if credit were still flowing freely. But credit is contracting, which means that commercial real estate is in especially dire circumstances. Refinancing commercial properties has become an extremely difficult task. Without the ability to refinance – or to sell at a profitable level – properties will continue to stumble into foreclosure and liquidation, which will put continuous pressure on property values.

Owners of underwater properties will have to either default and hand the title over to the lender, or they’ll have to inject an impractically large amount of new equity into the property to qualify for refinancing. And in these cases, we are talking about face-to-face negotiations between borrowers and lenders. In the modern “securitized” economy, face-to-face negotiations have become as rare and quaint a concept as the corner malt shop. In the modern economy, most mortgages are sliced and diced into unrecognizable portions of various mortgage-backed securities (MBS).

Think of securitization this way: Image your pet pig ran away from home and stumbled into a sausage factory. If you searched for your pig at the end of the sausage production line, you probably couldn’t find him. He’d be there alright, but not in a form you would recognize. He is there; but he is now everywhere. So is your mortgage.

Securitization is, therefore, a very toxic aspect of this particular commercial real estate bust. Simply stated, securitized mortgage structures are not designed to function in our current environment — one with falling collateral values and soaring defaults. Let me highlight the loan restructuring challenge ahead for troubled commercial property owners and their lenders.

Take just one example of evaporating equity in commercial properties. It shows why stressed property owners cannot easily renegotiate terms with their lenders. A few weeks ago, Sunstone Hotel Investors Inc. defaulted on its mortgage on W San Diego hotel. Sunstone bought the W for $96 million in 2006. The transaction was financed by a $65 million mortgage that was sliced, diced, and sold into the commercial mortgage-backed security (CMBS) market. The W’s value is now below the face amount of the mortgage, so Sunstone will likely write its equity down to zero and turn the deed for the W (i.e., the mortgage collateral) over to creditors in order to eliminate its mortgage obligation.

Sunstone defaulted when it skipped its June 1 payment on the W hotel’s mortgage. Thus, Sunstone basically invited its servicer, Centerline Servicing, to foreclose on the hotel. Centerline represents the interests of the lenders, who are spread throughout the ownership structure of CMBS. Without the chance to renegotiate, the only real option is for lenders to foreclose and auction off collateral. Even worse, if Centerline were to approach the lenders about restructuring the mortgage, the lenders would have different objectives — some would want to liquidate collateral to get paid, while others would prefer to renegotiate and hope for a rebound in collateral value. This is known in the securitization business as “tranche warfare.”

From a legal standpoint, borrowers are too far away from ultimate lenders. The complex legal structure of CMBS practically guarantees that sensible loan restructurings, including debt-for-equity swaps, are very difficult.

Now apply this situation to hundreds of other properties around the U.S., and you can see how securitization (CMBS) practically eliminates the potential for property owners to meet with their creditors and renegotiate. Private sector creditors who want to participate in fire sales and in very attractive loans are waiting for property to fall to more reasonable levels first. Banks are not going to refinance commercial mortgages coming due on properties that are down 50% from peak values, and no equity is left. This means that the foreclosure market will dominate the overall market, pushing values for every comparable property down even more.

There will not be any legitimate bottom in the REIT market until there is a bottom in the prices of commercial real estate mortgages. The smart institutional money will initiate its investment in real estate by buying the distressed mortgages of attractive properties, NOT by buying REIT shares. These investors will want to buy claims on commercial property market that are high up in the capital structure, not gamble on equity in properties, which may be worth a fraction of peak values — or zero. That’s why I’m monitoring transactions in the commercial real estate debt markets, looking for signs of a true bottom.

The “bottom” we saw in early March was almost entirely due to the Fed’s extraordinary commitment to print money in an attempt to prop up old bubbles. This caused a temporary rally in CMBS and REITs. The most stressed REITs used this as an opportunity to de-lever their balance sheets just a smidge by flooding the market with new shares. With the window for REIT secondary offerings closing, by fall we should see another leg down in the Dow Jones U.S. Real Estate Index.

The real buyers for CMBS and commercial property are professional investors – not the Fed or taxpayers. By and large, these professionals are waiting for bargains, with bids far below the current market.

So should you.

Source: Sell REITs

“Imagine a man in California,” writes Todd Zywicki, a professor at George Mason University School of Law, “who speculated in real estate at the height of the housing bubble. He bought a house with no money down and an adjustable-rate mortgage. But before he could flip that house for a profit, the market collapsed. He then owed more than his house was worth, but he knew that under his state’s laws it would be impossible for his bank to sue him for the balance of his loan if he abandoned the house to foreclosure.

“What is this man likely to do?”

The answer is simple: he defaults, thanks to California’s default-friendly laws.

This has led Team Obama to propose new regulation that would supposedly protect consumers from predatory lenders and dangerous loans. But do consumers, or speculators, for that matter, need such protection? Probably not says Zywicki…

Virtually every credit product is valuable to some consumers. Low-documentation loans are a boon for homeowners with a lot of equity who want to refinance their mortgages (even as they are a dangerous thing to offer speculators). […]Treating all consumers as hapless victims rather than recognizing that many consumers rationally respond to incentives is a recipe for unintended consequences. It can lead to counterproductive regulation that makes loans more expensive and harder to get. […]

Instead of a new consumer financial products safety commission, Washington should revise the disclosures it mandates for mortgages, its tax and other incentives that encourage overinvestment in housing, and the incentives for homeowners to walk away from their homes. Our current problems are caused by misaligned incentives and the rational response of consumers and lenders to those incentives. It’s not a crisis of consumer protection. A new agency premised on the erroneous belief what consumers need is to be protected from themselves is likely to do more harm than good.

There was a house – a shack, really – that appraised for $132,000 and got a mortgage of $103,000. The owner hadn’t worked in 13 years. Upon foreclosure, a neighbor bought the house and paid $18,000 just to tear the thing down.

America, it seems, just went crazy – borrowers, lenders, nearly everybody. These anecdotes and others are told in a new book titled More Mortgage Meltdown by money managers Whitney Tilson and Glenn Tongue.

But what caused the mania and how we got there is less to the point than what happens from here. Even so, the stories are amazing…

“If the problems in the mortgage market were limited to subprime loans, then the carnage would be mostly behind us,” the authors note. Subprime loans were the riskiest mortgage loans. Prime loans. By contrast, were made to borrowers who made a substantial down payment and had good credit history.

The subprime borrowers were the fuirst to fail…but they certainly will not be the last. The nearby chart, which appeared in the May 22, 2009 edition of the Rude Awakening, shows the other mortgage markets, most of which are only now beginning to show signs of distrress.

The first thing to jump out at you is that subprime is only about a $1.5 trillion market – not anywhere near the biggest of the risky loan categories. There are other layers here.

Subprime is only one slice of low-grade bologna. It sits at the bottom. Alt-A is the next riskiest slice of mortgages above subprime. Alt-A are mortgages to people who are better credit risks than subprime, but still not prime. Documentation is still spotty as far as verifying income, and loan-to-value ratios are high. Plus, about a quarter of these mortgages went to non-owner-occupied homes – which were subject to even greater speculation.

The scary thing is that this mortgage market is 150% bigger than subprime. Unlike subprime, Alt-A loans typically have five-year resets – meaning, the interest rates adjust to higher rates. The Alt-A reset surge doesn’t really get started until 2010! It continues through 2012.

You’ll also see something called “option ARMs” on that chart. Even though the option Arm market is much smaller than the subprime market, it is also much riskier. An “option ARM” is a loan that allows the borrower to pay less than the total amount due from month to month. Whatever amount the borrower does not pay is added to the total loan amount…up to a pre-determined limit.

Obviously, loans like these are very easy to satisfy initially, but can become difficult or impossible if the borrower has been making token payments for a long time. What’s worse, these loans usually offered ultra-low teaser rates at inception, then re-set to higher fixed rates later on. The reset surge for these loans only starts in 2010.

You’ll also see something called “jumbo prime.” These are big loans – on average about $750,000. These were common in the most inflated bubble states, such as California and Florida, and were often made to poor credit risks. This is a market of $1-1.5 trillion – about as big as subprime.

Then there are home equity lines, which you’ll see just below jumbo prime. In calendar 2007, Tilson and Tongue explain, home equity lines funded “30% of new car purchases in California and 20% in Florida.” These loans are second loans, behind all the garbage I mentioned above. That means that many home equity loans will be a total loss for the lenders, as housing prices have collapsed and can’t even support the junk loans in first position, much less junior liens like home equity lines.

I won’t go into all of these loan categories, but I think you get the picture. All together, these “other” loan categories total more than $5 trillion – or more than three times sub-prime. Even worse, issuance peaked during the peak bubble years of 2005, 2006 and 2007.

Moreover, the pattern for all of these loans was the same. You see rapid growth in the bubble years, roughly from 2000-2007.

Through March of 2009, banks had taken only $1.1 trillion in write-downs to date. Even the most conservative estimates put total credit losses at $2.2 trillion. Tilson and Tongue make a convincing case that the losses will be far worse than that – more like $3.8 trillion. And these numbers seem only to grow over time. I remember sitting at a Grant’s conference over a year ago when John Paulson, the fund manager who saw all this coming and profited mightily, tossed out $1 trillion as the number for total losses. That number induced gasps at the time.

So I think Tilson and Tongue will be closer to the mark. It may well be even more than that when it is all said and done. The fallout from all of this is that the banks will have to raise a lot more capital. They’ve raised only $1 trillion so far – yes, “only.” Given the high leverage in the banking sector, they may yet need to raise at least another $1 trillion. I don’t see how that is possible in today’s market. Where is the money going to come from?

The margin for error is extremely small.

As banks’ assets got riskier – with subprime, Alt-A and all the rest – the banks actually borrowed more to hold these assets. The typical bank has only 4 cents of tangible equity for every dollar of assets. That means a 4% drop in asset value wipes out the equity – making the bank insolvent. The banking system is vastly undercapitalized. Throughout the 1990s, banks operated on leverage of about 16-to-1. Today, they operate on 25-to-one leverage…or higher!

And this, then, answers the great fundamental question that seems to baffle so many market commentators. Why aren’t the banks lending? People point to the trillions of dollars the government pumped into the economy, including on bank balance sheets.

The answer is that the bankers know they will need the money to cover losses from their toxic loan portfolios. The banks are clearly not lending. Banks are cutting lines of credit to consumers – and to businesses, too. New loans in various business categories are down 60-80% from where they were a year ago.

It is hard to imagine any economic recovery when the banking system has such gaping funding holes it needs to fill. As it is, banks are failing and the losses are severe – on average, the losses amount to more than 40% of assets. The data coming in on foreclosure recoveries are bleak. In California, recovery is often less than 35 cents on the dollar., which means a loss of 65 cents on the dollar. It’s not supposed to happen like this. If this crisis is anything like previous cycles, we’ve got a long way to go on bank failures.

How do we invest in this environment? For starters, continue to avoid banks and leveraged financial institutions in general. And don’t expect the banks to start lending so freely again anytime soon. That means you should also avoid businesses that depend on regular access to credit to grow – such as real estate investment trusts. I would also say that the housing market is not due for any recovery anytime soon. There is still enormous inventory to work through. So homebuilding stocks and related investments also face stiff head winds.

At the right price, I might buy almost anything else. But investing is hard enough without also taking on problems as big as the ones I’ve outlined here. There are plenty of other great places to fish. Continue to avoid the financials.

Source: The Ghost of Housing Past

This is a good analogy for the economy and markets. Our capitalist society is a beautiful thing that rewards entrepreneurs and intelligent risk takers and investors. But for the past few years, we’ve got ourselves into quite a tangle with the housing bubble and credit contagion.

And with such a big mess, it will be a while longer before we can straighten it all out and see an economic recovery. Here are the key areas to keep an eye on for clues as to when we’ll emerge on the other side…

An End To The Recession This Year? Don’t Bet On It…

A recent survey showed that the vast majority of economists believe we’ll come out of the recession in the second half of this year.

I’m not convinced. I think that’s a little too optimistic.

But regardless of my opinion, there are three crucial factors that will tell us that the economy is back on solid footing, regardless of the “technical” definition of recession.

Look To These Three Areas For Signs Of An Economic Recovery

~ Jobless Claims
Last week, the number of initial jobless claims fell to 631,000. While that’s certainly better than the 643,000 the week before, it’s still a horrendous number.

The national unemployment rate stands at 8.9% – and if you take into account the number of people who’ve given up looking for work, or those who are under-employed, that figure nearly doubles.

Speaking of the latter, while at Starbucks (Nasdaq: SBUX) last week, I heard the girl behind the counter tell a friend that she’s making one-third of what she made at her last job. At that rate, she’s probably just barely keeping her head above water, yet she isn’t counted in the official unemployment figures.

Stories like this are everywhere – people who’ve been able to keep their jobs, or stay employed somewhere, but needing to take a pay cut to do so.

It’s quite simple: The economy won’t be meaningfully better until those numbers come way down. At the very least, we need to see jobless claims under 500,000 before it looks like we’re even headed in the right direction.

But in the end, though, we want to see jobs created, not just fewer jobs eliminated. If people don’t have jobs, or don’t feel secure in their jobs, the economy isn’t going to get the injection of consumer spending (keep in mind that this accounts for about two-thirds of economic growth) that it needs to recover.

~ Housing Prices
As long as U.S. real estate prices are falling off a cliff, taking homeowners’ equity with them, consumers will feel poorer.

In March, for example, the average national home price collapsed by 18.7% from a year earlier. A CNBC story actually tried to put a positive spin on it by saying, “Some relief appeared to be in sight as, for the second month, prices did not slide at a record rate as they had been doing since 2007.”

Are you kidding me?! An 18.7% decline is relief? That’s like saying banging your head against a wall is “relief” after hitting yourself in the head with a Louisville Slugger.

Unlike the job market, we don’t necessarily need housing prices to rise to lift the economy… just to stabilize. If people have a sense that their largest asset is not going to decline in value, that should help ease anxiety. Until then, homeowners will be skittish.

And finally…

~ The Stock Market
The stock market is a forward-looking indicator and typically leads the economy by about six months.

Having climbed by 40% from the lows in March, it’s at a crucial juncture where it now needs to stay up. As I’ve said before, I don’t believe it will, but if it does manage to hold these gains and build a base, that would be a good indicator that things are turning around.

On the other hand, a decline to recent lows would suggest that the economists are wrong once again.

Good thing we don’t take our lead from economists. The best way to gauge the economy’s health right now is to look at these three simple, common sense data points. And so far, two of them are pointing in the wrong direction.

Marc Lichtenfeld

Source: When Will The Economy Recover? These Three Key Areas Will Tell You…

Waite is the publisher of the Personal Real Estate Investor, a glossy magazine that focuses on investors who buy houses or condos to manage for income or to fix up and sell for a profit. But he’s not some industry cheerleader whose statements are nothing but spin.

He’s a true expert on the U.S. housing sector who goes out of his way to “educate” journalists about the true state of the American housing market, and who criticizes most of the “indicators” in use as useless and irrelevant. Plus, as a onetime Wall Street venture-capitalist who subsequently joined Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road private equity crowd, Waite really understands how the Wall Street investment game is played – and, in the case of the U.S. housing market, the missteps Wall Street made and why.

“Wall Street analysts and economists do not understand the housing industry,” Waite told Money Morning in a recent interview. “While stocks and bonds are relatively simple to analyze, housing is anything but. Unlike stocks, housing is a non-tradable asset.”

But through the creation of mortgage-backed securities, Wall Street tried to transform housing into a tradable asset. That lack of understanding set the stage for the housing bubble. And it’s the same miscalculation that is keeping the big-money crowd from understanding that the housing market may have already bottomed – and may well be on its way back up.

Let’s look at both miscues.

Building a Bubble

Stocks and bonds are “tradable assets.” They trade on central exchanges – in a very efficient manner – and play well into the kind of mathematical averaging that paves the way for all sorts of indices (the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index), and sub-indices (the Dow Jones Transportation Index).

That’s not the case with housing, which is very granular in nature – meaning how housing does in one neighborhood differs greatly from how it does in another. Housing is a “non-traded” asset because it is hard to trade – and when it does trade does so in a highly inefficient market.

As Waite says, housing is referred to as “real” property for a reason: Unlike stocks or bonds, which are paper representations of the underlying asset, housing is the asset itself. People live in houses, and most don’t buy them as investments – they buy them to live in. The typical house is owned for five to seven years, and only about 5% of the U.S. housing stock turns over in a single year. In a “normal” period – by that, I mean a stretch that’s not artificially souped up by the unrealistically loose credit that led up to the subprime-mortgage debacle – prices escalate perhaps 3% to 4% annually. And there aren’t the whipsaw pricing patterns that we see with stocks.

Even so, as part of its mission to transform housing into a tradable asset, Wall Street designed a reporting system that, true to form, was badly flawed, Waite says. The measures applied to the market – sample size, methodology, and statistical presentation – work well for assets that are dynamically traded, as stocks are. But they don’t work for housing:

• Stocks are analyzed by looking at the underlying company’s fundamentals, meaning the conclusions reached are very much tied to the specific earnings power of that firm.
• Housing, by comparison, is analyzed make “illogical” generalizations about the market that fail to reflect reality.
• Stocks are analyzed in a forward-looking fashion, being all about earnings projections and expectations.
• Housing analysis ends up being backward looking (45 days to 180 days), meaning the conclusions that are reached are likely outdated by the time we see them.
• Housing ends up being treated like a commodity, with “five-star” neighborhoods (where sales are brisk and the asking price is now being exceeded as prospective purchasers bid the values up in hopes of landing the house) being “averaged in” with “disastrous” one-star neighborhoods.

Says Waite: “Housing indexes and statistics emanating from Wall Street take a cynical view of housing … and they misrepresent the actual value of housing by ignoring the critically obvious point – most housing purchases are ‘buy, occupy and hold’,” and aren’t a speculative play aimed at short-term profits.

By misfiring so badly, Wall Street established an environment in which housing prices were expected to escalate at better-than-their-historical norms, fanning the speculative flames. The easy credit made available by the mortgage-backed debt market only made matters worse. Banks made loans, and Wall Street bundled those loans into an asset-backed security – giving the banks back the cash that they could then use to make their next round of loans. Because the loans were “averaged” out, the resultant securities were given the highest credit ratings by the ratings agencies – which was more than the securities deserved.

It was a recipe for disaster – or, at least, for a bubble.

Wall Street never saw it coming.

Anatomy of a Rebound

Wall Street has also failed to understand the dynamics of a housing market recovery – which is already in the works, Waite says.

And he should know. The portion of the real estate market that Waite’s magazine caters to – the real estate investor – is significant. In fact, a groundbreaking study commissioned by the magazine, and conducted by real-estate researcher REALTrends Inc., in concert with Harris Interactive, found that real estate investors account for 22% to 28% of all home sales (existing and new) each year – a total of 1.5 million to 1.64 million houses each year. That’s a big piece of a $300 billion industry, so it provides a very solid sample.

According to Waite, the housing market bottomed last year. But that bottoming takes place in stages. Housing values continue to decline. But values can’t bottom, solidify, and then head north until sales volumes increase, Waite says.

“First you get volume, and then you get valuations,” Waite says.

And it doesn’t get better across the board all at once: Sales will improve in a “predictable sequence” that start with the very best neighborhoods, work their way down to the really good neighborhoods, and finally reach the plain old good developments.

As noted, Waite says the very best neighborhoods are already seeing strongly improved sales, with actual bidding battles taking place as prospective buyers willingly pay more than the asking price in order to land the choicest properties.

As those markets sell out, and the credit spigots open, demand will move from the very best neighborhoods down to the “pretty good” residential properties, Waite says.

Three reports released over the course of three straight days the last week of March seem to support Waite’s view.

Sales of new homes rose 4.7% in February – the first increase in seven months, the U.S. Commerce Department reported March 26. The day before that report came out a government gauge of home prices posted its first gain in almost a year. And the third of that “hat trick” of upbeat reports issued that same week said that sales of previously owned homes – the biggest share of the market – also increased in February.

The plunge in housing prices is also starting to have an effect. In a second report issued March 26, the California Association of Realtors said that existing-home sales in the state were up 83% in February from the previous year. The reason: The median home price was down roughly 40%, which is helping shrink inventories to about a six months’ supply from 15 months in 2008.

If Waite’s theory is correct, as sales of new and existing homes pick up on a month-to-month basis, prices will follow.

But true to form, Wall Street is demanding proof.

The data “have allayed some fears that the housing market would continue to freefall,” Omair Sharif, an economist with RBS Greenwich Capital, told The Wall Street Journal. “But it’s way too early to say if we’ve hit bottom.”

But Waite fervently believes that bottom has already been hit and that it’s all uphill – over the long haul – from here.

“Wall Street would have you believe that putting money into a house is as sophisticated as putting money in a mattress,” he said. “But as it continues to prove, nothing could be further from the truth.”

[Editor's Note: Money Morning Investment Director Keith Fitz-Gerald says the ongoing financial crisis has changed the investing game forever, making uncertainty the norm and creating a whole set of new rules that will quickly determine who wins and who loses in today's global investing markets. Fitz-Gerald has already isolated these new rules and has unlocked the key to what he refers to as "The Golden Age of Wealth Creation ." His key discovery: Despite the gloom, investors may well be facing the greatest profit opportunity of their lifetimes.

In his newly launched Geiger Indexinvesting service, developed after more than a decade of work, Fitz-Gerald has amassed a winning streak of nine-straight profitable picks. Check out our latest insights on these new rules, this new market environment, and this new service, the Geiger Index .]

Source: Why Wall Street is Missing the U.S. Housing Recovery

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