Category: Top National News

National Real Estate Investor, Feb. 16, 2016–Anderson, Bendix
Multifamily rents are likely to keep rising in 2016, just not as fast as before, according to forecasts for the coming year.

Richmond Times Dispatch (Va.), Feb. 14, 2016–Little, Andrew R.
The first week of February was the annual Mortgage Bankers Association convention in Orlando, where about 5,000 industry professionals from all walks of the commercial lending world converged. The themes were hard to miss: Most conduit lenders made money in the first half of 2015 and then spent the second half trying not to lose it.

SFGate, Feb. 11, 2016–Landes, Emily
As San Francisco home prices continue to rise, a new report is calling the local market “overvalued” by about 16 percent.

National Mortgage News, Feb. 10, 2016–Collins, Brian
The flood of new apartments will put upward pressure on vacancy rates in the next two years, but the multifamily market should stay strong, according to a new Freddie Mac forecast. Lenders originated a record $256 billion in multifamily loans in 2015, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

National Real Estate Investor, Feb. 17, 2016–Beth Mattson-Teig
Although life companies are known for playing it safe when it comes to lending on commercial real estate, that narrow box hasn’t stopped them from doing big business in the space lately.

Bloomberg, Feb. 17, 2016–Mulholland, Sarah
Wall Street firms are readying themselves for new rules aimed at requiring them to eat what they cook. A provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law that takes effect in December forces banks to keep a stake in the commercial-property loans they package into securities and sell off to investors.

Sacramento Bee, Feb. 9, 2016–Kasler, Dale
CalPERS completed one of the biggest real estate investments in its history, purchasing a New York office tower for $1.9 billion.

KHOU (Houston), Feb. 9, 2016–Barr, Alice
The low price of oil is bringing on more uncertainty for a big chunk of Houston’s economy. Thousands of layoffs have rocked the oil and gas industry, and there’s no clear picture of when things could get better.

Wall Street Journal, Feb. 8, 2016–Brown, Eliot 
Companies from General Electric to Weyerhaeuser are pulling their headquarters out of leafy suburban campuses and moving to downtown high-rises. Figuring out what to do with the vacant corporate campuses left behind is a quandary for civic leaders and landlords across the U.S.

Real Estate Journals, Feb. 8, 2016
Freddie Mac at the MBA Commercial Real Estate Finance Conference announced the lenders that closed the most multifamily financing volume with the company last year. CBRE Capital Markets and Berkadia Commercial Mortgage topped the list.