The Green Street News team had a productive year of consistently breaking exclusive, market-moving news across our three highly-regarded publications — Commercial Mortgage Alert, Real Estate Alert and Asset-Backed Alert.

The list below highlights our top read articles from 2023 for each publication, which includes complimentary downloads throughout. Enjoy!

“Q1 Mortgage Securitizations Hit 11-Year Low” April: The commercial mortgage securitization market got off to such a slow start in the first quarter that it appears likely this year’s total volume of new deals will plunge to its lowest level in more than a decade.

“Soaring Benchmarks Clobber CMBS Market” October: The recent runup in interest rates is causing renewed headaches for CMBS lenders, dashing their already slim hopes of a post-summer pickup in what has been a dismal year for new-loan volume. (Download Full Article/Edition?)

“Insurers Hit New Lending Peak, See Slow '23” March: The top insurance-company lenders notched another volume record in 2022, but business is expected to remain cool through the end of 2023 amid headwinds that began buffeting the industry last year.

“Banks Log Near-Record Loan Growth in 2022” April: The largest banks expanded their commercial-property loan books faster in 2022 than they have in any year since the global financial crisis, largely fueled by an uptick in multifamily lending. The top 100 banks by debt holdings had just over $1.7 trillion of loans at yearend, up 15.1% year over year, according to regulatory data compiled by Trepp Bank Navigator. By comparison, total assets for the cohort rose just 0.9%. (Download Full Article)

“Mezz Lenders Prep for Surge in Originations” June: The field of high-yield lenders is getting more crowded amid a long-running pullback by originators of senior loans on commercial properties in the U.S.

“CMBS Lenders Prep Big Refi of Orlando Resort” October: The CMBS teams at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Barclays are on track to originate $750 million of floating-rate debt to refinance a large luxury resort in Florida.

“CMBS Shops Prep Two Big Blackstone Refis” April: Blackstone is working with CMBS lenders on two refinancings, totaling $2.14 billion, that could breathe some life into the dormant market for single-borrower securitizations.

“Key Inks Fannie Debt on Manufactured Homes” September: KeyBank Real Estate Capital has originated two Fannie Mae loans totaling $1.23 billion to refinance a massive portfolio of manufactured-housing communities.

“Big NY Condo Project Seeks $1 Billion Loan” August: A Zeckendorf Development partnership is looking for $1 billion of construction debt to build a luxury residential condominium tower next to a sprawling Google campus in Manhattan.

“Wave of Maturing CMBS Debt Hitting Soon” December: CMBS servicers will have their hands full in the first half of next year, as borrowers struggle to pay off a soaring volume of large, securitized mortgages facing final maturity. (Download Full Article)

“Smaller Sales Steadier Amid Dislocation; CBRE Retakes Lead” Aug: Sales of commercial real estate valued from $5 million to $25 million fell 29% in the first six months of the year — half the drop that was logged in the $25 million-and-up market. CBRE tops the league table as the most active broker, outpacing 2022’s full-year winner Marcus & Millichap, in second place. JLL, Colliers and Cushman & Wakefield rounded out the top five. Newmark, in sixth place, was the only other firm with a significant market share. (Download Full Special Edition Article)

“Placement Agents Waiting for Dust to Settle” October: Rising interest rates, reticent institutional investors and a dearth of property trades have created the most challenging real estate market for placement agents since the global financial crisis.

“Carr JV Pitches Stake in Trophy Boston Offices” March: A Carr Properties partnership plans to unload a stake in a new trophy Boston office tower that’s fully leased and has a total valuation of up to $1.3 billion — the largest such offering to hit the block in years there.

“JPMorgan Puts LA-Area Office Listing on Ice” April: JPMorgan Asset Management has paused its marketing campaign for a massive office campus in Santa Monica, Calif., betting that a flight to quality in the leasing market will help boost the trophy property’s occupancy.

“Tides Tell Investors to Brace for Capital Calls” June: Tides Equities, which amassed a $7 billion multifamily portfolio during the recent apartment boom, has told its investors to expect imminent capital calls.

“Investors Drawn to Student-Housing Strength” November: Student housing is bucking the broader slowdown in sales activity seen in other property sectors, with a wave of fresh listings hitting the market in recent weeks.

“Apartment Investor Carroll Puts Itself in Play” April: Multifamily shop Carroll has hired UBS to explore a full or partial sale of its business. The process is in the early stages, but the Atlanta-based firm is aiming to complete it by the middle of this summer.

“CalSTRS Abandons Huge SoCal Industrial Deal” September: A California State Teachers partnership has dropped its plan to buy a 3 million-sf industrial-property portfolio in Southern California’s Inland Empire for nearly $1 billion in cash.

“Banks Report Fewer Bad Loans ... For Now” May: Bad debt on bank balance sheets ticked down again in 2022, but the data belies a wave of loans maturing this year that could translate to distressed offerings for equity buyers.

“Average Office Prices Down 22% This Year” Nov: Average sale prices for office and retail properties plunged further in the past year, multifamily valuations dropped after peaking in 2022, and industrial properties and hotels are trading at their highest levels ever. Those are the top-line findings of Real Estate Alert’s inaugural review of weighted average sale prices on a per-sf and per-unit basis for trades worth $25 million and up in Green Street’s Sales Comps Database. (Download Full Article)

“Issuers, Buyers See Appeal in Private CLOs” August: Large investors seeking exposure to direct lending increasingly are turning to customized products with broad similarities to collateralized loan obligations. (Download Full Article)

“Insurers Boost In-House Dealmaking Teams” October: Several life-insurance companies are expanding their structured-product investment teams, with an emphasis on adding personnel who would work with issuers to assemble deals to their specifications.

“Issuers Sound Alarms Over CRT Prohibition” March: With the SEC’s surprise proposal to reduce conflicts of interest in securitizations also threatening to bar U.S. issuers from carrying out risk-transfer deals, those institutions are scrambling to form last-minute arguments against the measure.

“CLOs Prepare for Switch to SOFR -- Finally” April: At long last collateralized loan obligation managers have begun preparing in earnest for Libor’s sunset, assuaging fears that their mass procrastination on the transition to SOFR could spell operational chaos.

“PIK Exposures Petrify Rental-Home Pipeline” June: Prospects for funding rental-home portfolios through securitization continue to darken, with investors demanding ever-deepening discounts to consider new offerings in the sector.

“Pros See Another Stark Year on the Horizon” January: Industry participants don’t see securitization volume rebounding anytime soon. Market professionals expect global issuance this year will fall short even of its dismal 2022 output, as rising interest rates, crushing inflation and geopolitical unrest continue to create a domino effect, driving many investors to the sidelines and further jacking up funding costs for issuers. (Download Full Article)

“Non-QM Cupboards Left Bare By 1Q Binge” March: What looked like a second wind for issuance of bonds backed by home loans that don’t meet the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s qualified-mortgage standards may have been a last gasp.

“C-PACE Loans Gain Ground on Mortgages” September: Continued sluggishness in the market for traditional commercial real estate lending is setting the stage for Property Assessed Clean Energy Lending to gain. The outcome, market professionals believe, is that commercial-PACE capital will come to represent ever-larger portions of the debt on existing properties and, especially, new projects — in some cases rivaling the sizes of senior mortgages.

“US ABS Grows as Global Market Contracts” October: The U.S. asset-backed bond market grew slightly over the first nine months of the year, sidestepping some of the macroeconomic factors that have curtailed broader markets. But that growth wasn’t enough to boost worldwide issuance of new securitizations, which plunged 27.4% from a year earlier as of Sept. 30. (Download Full Article)

“Issuance Drought Carrying into Second Half” July: With issuance activity still slumping deeply, securitization professionals are writing off the possibility of a significant rebound before yearend. Worldwide sales of new asset-backed securities, collateralized loan obligations and residential and commercial mortgage paper totaled $353.4 billion from Jan. 1 to June 30, according to Asset-Backed Alert’s ABS Database.

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