(Read more on the multifamily market and more on the debt and equity markets.)
BETHESDA, MD-Green Park Financial has provided funding for a local senior housing multifamily deal, providing $22 million in financing to the buyer. Ted Patch, SVP and chief production officer, declined to name the buyer or seller other than to say it is a local deal. The pricing, though, was “fairly aggressive given the stability of the project and we were able to make some fairly aggressive underwriting assumptions based on that stability,” he tells GlobeSt.com. Ballpark, he says, pricing was in the low 130s over the 10-year Treasury.
As one of the largest dedicated multifamily lenders, Green Park is as good an indicator as any as to the health of this piece of the commercial real estate industry. “I think that in the beginning part of the year, the market was overheated and obviously the conduits were too aggressive and that resulted in where we are now,” Patch tells GlobeSt.com. Green Park as well as other lenders had to be aggressive in their own underwriting to stay competitive. Now, though, the firm is maintaining its aggressiveness–tempered somewhat in its underwriting–despite the absence of the conduit market. Of course location counts. It is easy to be aggressive in the DC market, Patch says.
“This area continues to be a strong market. Because of its fundamentals we feel comfortable being more aggressive in and around the DC area.” Other competitive drivers for multifamily lending include the continued participation by life insurance companies in these deals. Also Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are just as willing to provide financing as they were before the credit crunch, despite the rebuff of their request to raise their portfolio limits.
Indeed, Fannie Mae has just put in place new regulations that are expected to help DUS lenders bring even more deals to market faster than before. In effect for the last few weeks, these regulations, or underwriting guidances, should cut down on the instances in which lenders had to query the agency for waiver requests. In essence, it has delegated many of the decisions Fannie Mae used to make in underwriting a transaction to the DUS lender. The new standards impact waiver requests for the size of deal, IO loans, and new designations for LTV ratios and debt service coverage. To give one example: a mortgage with a loan term between seven to 10 years and an LTV equal to 70% or lower can be underwritten with a full term IO period without special approval.
“Overall, it is a much more efficient execution for them,” Patch says. “For us it gives us the ability to do what we think we do best–which is structure complicated deals in creative ways that effectively meet the borrowers needs.”
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Erika Morphy
Erika Morphy has been writing about commercial real estate at GlobeSt.com for more than ten years, covering the capital markets, the Mid-Atlantic region and national topics. She's a nerd so favorite examples of the former include accounting standards, Basel III and what Congress is brewing.
