With the demise of some of the biggest Wall St lenders, as well as the severe contractions of some of the commercial finance companies, there is a huge gap of capacity in the lending market now that real estate values and cash flows are once again on the upswing. There is not going to be the flood of distressed paper and properties that we all had anticipated, and now that banks are in much better balance sheet condition, they are in a better position to find ways to workout problems with their better customers. Most of the really bad loans either have been or are in the process of being dealt with. While there are still hundreds of billions of loan maturities yet to come, it appears from situations I have been involved with as an advisor, that further extensions and modifications are continuing. At some point all of these loans do need to be refinanced. It is also clear that a lot of loans will not qualify for CMBS executions over the next few years with the better and tighter underwriting standards.

There are inevitably people who recognize a need and move to fill it. A number of experienced teams are now attempting to raise capital; to form new lending platforms. Some are intending to stay focused on just recreating commercial lending operations focused on doing traditional $5 to $50 million real estate commercial finance lending. Others are intending to build much bigger platforms over time by starting with straight commercial lending then expanding to include mezzanine, and eventually CMBS platforms.

What is interesting is the appearance of some offshore private groups who also see the opportunity and are bringing the capital in search of a team. These are private family or company operations that have the capital to support a modest operation here, say $100 million equity, and then intend to raise additional capital in the US as the operation ramps up. Some are intending to create substantial US platforms.