The question I'm asked most often these days is whether loans are selling for just pennies on the dollar. The answer: yes, but very few of them.

The commercial real estate landscape has legions of investors with massive war chests of cash lined up, waiting for owners to sell their troubled loans for acceptable prices. However, one must consider the overall state of the US economy and its affect on the banks holding these assets. At the same time, investors have been assembling for more than a year and are ready to swing into action.

Investors looking for deep discounts in commercial loans, however, might as well be waiting for Godot. It's not happening any time soon, or ever in this cycle-at least not when portfolios of loans are packaged properly to maximize values for the seller. When we market loan portfolios on behalf of the FDIC or many of our banking clients, one of the most important parts of the process is the stratification of loans into individual pools that will be most attractive to sophisticated buyers. For this reason, we strongly believe in keeping the packages homogeneous to the type of collateral, meaning pooling loans by asset class, quality, geography, balance size, etc. When you mix loans secured by industrial property with loans on office properties, for example, it drags down the value of the pool.