Commercial Loans and Fun Blog

Great recessions - the S&L Crisis, the Dot-Com Meltdown, and the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 - have not been kind to hard money funds.

Almost every hard money fund in existence before the S&L Crisis failed.  The same thing happened during the Dot-Com Meltdown.  Ditto during the Great Financial Crisis.

Are you currently invested in a hard money mortgage fund?  Hmmm.  Ted Turner, after he had just sold Turner Broadcasting to Time Warner, told his two sons, both executives at Turner, "You're toast."  Cruel bastard.  Haha!

The cycle goes as follows:  A hard money mortgage fund is formed when a sponsor syndicates a bunch of private investors into a blind pool.  It's like a mutual fund of trust deed investments, right?  The investors' risk is diversified, and the pool is professionally managed.  Secured by real estate.  What could go wrong?

Then, almost predictably every 8 to 12 years, a stock market crash or a real estate crash (usually both) washes through.  Real estate falls by almost exactly 45%.  Investors then flood the offices of the sponsor demanding to withdraw from the fund.

The sponsor releases the tiny amount of liquidity on hand, but now he's stuck.  He has no cash on hand with which to make new loans.  He normally earns three points every time he closes a new loan, and he uses that income to pay salaries and overhead.  His loan servicing income is absurdly low.  This last issue is the fatal mistake.

Within three months of any crash, many hard money funds start to crash.  Within nine months, unless the sponsor's family is as rich as George Soros, even the strongest of fund sponsors has thrown in the towel.  The fund sponsor closes its doors.

The problem for the investors is that when the sponsor goes bankrupt, no one is left to watch the shop.  When borrowers are late, no one calls to nag them.  Many borrowers therefore stop paying altogether.

The real estate taxes on many loans go unpaid. Hopefully none of the properties burns to the ground after the borrower had stopped paying his fire insurance premiums.

Finally, the bankruptcy court appoints a trustee (cha-ching) to marshal the assets of the fund and a bankruptcy attorney (cha-ching) to represent the rights of the investors. The first thing the Trustee does is to appoint a CPA firm (cha-ching) to audit the books and conduct an accounting (cha-ching) of every loan in the fund’s portfolio. 

In the meantime, no one is winterizing the buildings that have come back in foreclosure. Pipes are breaking, and the insurance doesn’t cover the losses (cha-ching) because the buildings were not kept heated. Vandals are breaking into the properties and are stealing the appliances and copper pipes (cha-ching) because no one has installed fencing and/or security alarms monitored by an alarm company.

OMGoodness.  Hahahaha!

The Court then appoints a Receiver (cha-ching) to protect the assets of the fund.  The bleeding slows from a gusher to just a steady bleed of gallons. The Receiver hires a property management company (cha-ching) to manage the foreclosed properties

But the Receiver only has so much give-a-darn, so he is not going to renovate any foreclosed properties before he sells them (dumb!), choosing instead to sell the REO’s (foreclosed properties) as-is at fire sale prices.  Cha-ching, cha-ching.

The fund’s assets are relentlessly whittled down.  By the end, the investors feel blessed to walk away with 30% to 45% of their original investment. 

B&S proudly charges the highest loan servicing fee
in the industry.  It's how we survive crashes.

Two years after the crash, new sponsors are starting up new trust deed funds.  Seven to ten years later, the next crash hits.  The cycle repeats itself.  Again and again.  Thank heavens its only been two years since the Crash of 2008.  [Chuckle]

"But wait.  George, your hard money shop, Blackburne & Sons, has survived for 44 years.  How do you do it?"

Blackburne & Sons fractionalizes every loan.  John Smith might take $30,000 in a $400,000 first trust deed on a San Jose mini-storage property.  Mary Jones might take $25,000.  A rich physician might take $50,000.

Title to these trust deed investments is then vested directly in the names of the investors (as opposed to some fund).  "Stephen and Mary Calhoun, husband and wife, as to any undivided 11.34% interest."  

If a North Korean missile ever takes out Sacramento and Blackburne & Sons (yikes, no longer a silly example), the investors would simply hire a local real estate broker to service their loan.

I genuinely believe that owning lots of small pieces in lots of different first trust deeds is a pretty decent way to weather the next real estate crash.  The key is to own these investments in your own name, as opposed to that of some fund.  Invest in fractionalized first trust deeds.

Disclosure:

Investing in first trust deeds involves substantial risk.  A severe and prolonged decline in real estate values is possible.  Be sure to study the Risk Factors section of the Offering Circular or Private Placement Memorandum carefully before investing.  This is not an offer to sell securities.  Such an offer will only be made when accompanied by an Offering Circular or Private Placement Memorandum.

And whatever you do, stay the heck away from any hard money mortgage funds!  I am tempted to bet you a lobster dinner that the hard money fund in which you are currently invested was started after the Crash of 2008. Am I right?

Old Blackburne & Sons has been in business for 44 years.  Please listen to this Eagle Scout and proud father to two more Eagle Scouts.  :-)  A poop storm is coming.  Are you old enough to remember when the word, limited partnership, was reviled?  Just wait.

I told you we try to have fun.  :-)

During the COVID lockdowns, franchise hotels that cost $15 million to build were, at least according to the Income Approach, essentially worthless.  They were all losing money.  Then COVID ended, travel resumed, profits returned, and their values soared back up to over $15 million.

Now think about golf courses.  Beautiful $14 million golf courses, in affluent areas and lined with mansions, were, at least according to some idiots, worth less than $3 million because they were losing money.  There were too many golf courses.

Then many over-leveraged golf courses failed.  Supply fell to meet demand.  Those $3 million courses soon soared to $7 million and more, as the owners were finally able to raise their greens fees.  

Can you imagine some new developer spending $14 million to build a competing golf course today?  It will be decades  before the numbers justify the construction of any new golf courses.  Golf course owners are protected from new competition.

Now think about office buildings.  Construction costs have soared with inflation.  The replacement cost of most office towers today is stratospheric.

Some would argue that the world has discovered that it doesn’t need so much office space.  People can work from home, right?  As a result, office towers in New York City are selling for just 45% of their values six years ago.

No one ever listens to me, but brokers...
It's all about loan servicing rights.

Some lender had a delinquent $200+ million first mortgage on a half-empty office tower in NYC.  The lender just sold that note for around $100 million to George Soros.

I think Mr. Soros was savvy enough to realize that the replacement cost of real estate often matters a great deal.  Soros will probably foreclose on the building, but he is wealthy enough to hold that office building until supply falls enough to meet demand.  

I think that Elon Musk is a pretty smart guy too.  He says that workers are much less efficient when they work from home.  He ordered everyone working for his companies to return to the office.  Other companies may discover the same thing.  

I think George Soros just made one helluva deal.  Can you imagine how long it will be before any competing office towers are built?  Fifteen years?  Longer?  Astronomical construction costs are a very high barrier to new competition.  He has that moat around his office space leasing business that Warren Buffet is always talking about.

The following excellent article was recently published on LinkedIn by Michael Comparato, President and Head of Commercial Real Estate at BSP/Franklin Templeton (NYSE: FBRT):

Of the $6 trillion of outstanding commercial real estate (CRE) debt, approximately $3 trillion is held within our banking system. Of that $3 trillion, approximately 70% is with regional and community banks. 

There’s a reason why regional and community banks have all but stopped lending for the past 18 months.  It's not because things are good.  We are in the early days of a meaningful regional and community bank crisis, period, hard stop.

And while the banking system represents approximately 50% of the overall CRE credit market, banks historically have represented a meaningfully higher percentage (70%?) of construction lending for multifamily assets. 

Are we dealing with an oversupply of multifamily in certain markets?  Yes.  But its a short-term oversupply.  Reminder, the US has had a chronic housing shortage for decades…and after “all” this supply comes online, guess what?  We’ll still have a multi-million unit housing shortage. 

With banks on the sidelines, and staying there for the foreseeable future, supply is falling off a cliff. Multifamily starts are half of what they were a year ago.  They are only headed in one direction…down. 

2026, 2027, 2028 will go back to strong multifamily rent growth years because of the lack of supply.

During the Dot-Com craze, the hot new buzzword - the term the show-offs were using - was eyeballs.  This term referred to the number of visitors to your website.  The more eyeballs, the greater the traffic you were enjoying.

At the time, David-sized C-Loans.com, funded out-of-pocket by the Blackburne family, was competing against fifteen new commercial mortgage portals funded by Wall Street.  The Big Boys from New York were throwing millions at the space.  

No one seemed at all about concerned about closings.  It was all about eyeballs.  Me?  C-Loans had to actually close commercial loans so we could make payroll.  That real life requirement saved my business.

I remember thinking to myself, "These guys are idiots.  They expect borrowers to spend four to five hours filling out these copious online forms before ever getting a real-life lender to say, 'Hey, we looked at your deal.  We are genuinely interested and think the loan will fly.'"  

Hey, Dummies, borrowers and brokers need feedback and encouragement!  When you use C-Loans.com, our online form takes just eight minutes to complete.  Within minutes, if your deal is do-able, hungry lenders will be chasing you with calls and emails. 

But if your commercial loan request is a dud, no one will call you.  You will get nothing but turndown emails.  But at least now you know.  You wasted no more than eight minutes.

Dot-com stocks suddenly crashed.  The fifteen commercial mortgage portals competing against us suddenly had to show a profit.  Ha!  All fifteen competing portals had received at least $1 million in funding.  I doubt any of them ever closed a single deal.  

I remember thinking of that situation like it was a dark room full of giants, hacking and slashing at each other.  C-Loans was like a little person in that pitch black room, getting kneed and jostled by the giants, with no one paying any attention to us. 

Suddenly, the room was quiet.  "Hellooo?  I called out.  Anyone still alive out there?  They were all gone.  Probably $25 million in VC capital was burned up.  C-Loans.com went on to close well over 1,000 commercial real estate loans totaling over $1 billion.  We closed two large loans just this past week.

When this next great recession hits, I will be
enjoying $63,000 in monthly servicing income?  You?

Now on to trading, the new hot buzzword used by all of the Big Boys.   We traded this.  We traded that.

Surprisingly, it does not mean, in Big Boys slang, we exchanged this, or we exchanged that.  It simply means we sold this property.

Or it could mean that we financed this big property.  The aspiring Big Boys drop the term whenever they can.

Your real estate license authorizes you to trade in real estate.

Simply put, trading in real estate is acting on behalf of a consumer or investor to buy or sell real property, which includes land and any dwellings attached to or included with the land, such as houses, apartment buildings, condominiums, commercial space and mobile homes. Trading also includes commercial leasing and commercial property management.

Trading does not include residential leasing and property management, selling time shares, businesses without land (like a mobile food truck), business equipment not including land (like hair salon furnishings), facilitating a new construction on already owned land and trailers or mini homes without land.

Are you an accredited investor?

Iran is now out of the war.  Hooray!  Let's celebrate and have some fun.  Lots of memes today.

World War III - The War of the Four Dictators - just lost a major combatant this month. Iran has been utterly humiliated and emasculated. Iran launched around 180 drones and 120 ballistic missiles at Israel in a massive attack designed to punish Israel for striking its embassy.  

Of the 120 ballistic missiles fired at Israel from Iran, the U.S. officials told CBS News only five got through Israeli and U.S. air defenses and hit Israeli territory. One U.S. official told CBS News that roughly half of their ballistic missiles failed on launch or crashed in flight.

Do stock markets crash when they are
at all-time lows or at all-time highs?  Hmmm.

The brilliant defense was not just a product of the Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome. Israeli F35i’s, their specially-modified F35’s, shot down dozens of drones and ballistic missiles while they were still hull down; i.e., below the horizon.

Israel was greatly aided by American warships, as well by missile batteries from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the United Arab Emigrates. Something like 94% of all of the 300 incoming airborne threats (including drones) were neutralized.

Then Israel took its sweet ‘ole time in retaliating. For the first time, Israeli missiles struck targets on Iranian soil. The precedent has now been set. Iranian ground is no longer sacrosanct. If Iranian proxies attack Israel again, Israel’s retaliatory response may strike Iran proper again.  

Israel’s retaliatory attack was hilarious. Instead of attacking Iran’s precious nuclear missile factories, Israel simply struck the SAM sites guarding these facilities. These nuclear facilities are now defenseless.  It was as if Israel’s hero went over and kicked the shit out of the seven huge eunuchs guarding the Sultan’s harem… only to leave the pretty girls untouched. [Chuckle]

Iran has been shown to be a paper tiger. The War of Four Dictators is now down to the remaining three of them.  It’s no wonder why the price of gold took a tumble (for about three weeks).

"Poop, poop, poop!" screamed the commercial mortgage broker, as he and his borrower suddenly realized that they had been scammed out of a $50,000 "application fee" by a con man masquerading as a direct commercial lender.

Let's examine today where this commercial mortgage broker went wrong, why he could end up getting sued by his client, and how he could lose his license when he cannot repay the $50,000 application fee, plus the $127,000 in legal fees run up by his client.

The mistake that the commercial mortgage broker made was that the loan terms offered in the "commercial lender's" term sheet were too good.  This should have sent up a red flag.

The offer from the so-called lender was for a $6.5 million construction loan at 5.25%.  Hellooo?  Banks are paying 5.25% just for deposits today.  How could a bank possibly pay 5.25% for deposits, loan out money at 5.25%, absorb loan losses, pay for overhead, and then make a profit???

Is pot legal in your state?  Have you been smoking it?

It's all about loan servicing rights.

Perhaps this broker and this borrower were thinking that some special lender exists - maybe some mystery lender from New York or maybe even from overseas - which makes commercial real estate loans at really low interest rates.

Let's explore this possibility.  Let's suppose you manage the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, and your orders are to win the best real estate loans in the United States.  You are authorized to keep dropping your interest rate until you win the deal.  Okaaay.  [Deep inhale.  This is good stuff, man.  Is it Hawaiian?  Haha!] 

Even if this were true, my question is this.  In light of the fact that residential mortgage rates today are around 7.25%, what is the name of competing bank or life company that is offering commercial loans at 5.5%?  Why would any lender drop their rate to 5.25%?

There has to be a competing lender for the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund to lower its rate to 5.25%!  Otherwise, why wouldn't the Saudi's just make all the commercial real estate loans it wants at 7.0%?  After all, the Saudi's aren't giving their money away.

Please grasp the concept that there are only a handful of different types of commercial lenders.  They are, in the order of best to worst, (1) Life Companies; (2) Conduits (CMBS lenders); (3) Commercial Banks; (4) Credit Unions; and finally (5) Private Lenders (hard money).

Yes, there are some hedge funds which make commercial real estate loans; but these are just private "partnerships" looking to earn a very high interest rate and a big handful of points.  Loans from hedge funds are expensive.

Each of these commercial lenders has to get the money they use to lend from somewhere.  After all, to be a commercial lender, you need money to lend.  Victims of application fee fraud always forget this.  To be a bona fide commercial lender, you need money to lend.  The question then become, where does this so-called lender get its money to lend?

Life companies (life insurance companies) get their money from life insurance premiums.  Conduits sell their completed loans into the bond market.  Banks and credit unions have depositors.  Hard money lenders raise their expensive money from wealthy private investors. 

So how on earth is the advance fee scammer going to raise money at 3% so he can lend it at 5.25%?  The idea doesn't make sense. 

This is the pirate who helped General Andrew Jackson
at the Battle of New Orleans in 1814.

Bottom line:  If some strange "commercial lender" has issued a term sheet for a commercial loan, look at the interest rate he is offering.  Is it less than market?  If so, drop this crook like a hot potato.

I don't know if you heard about this, but last week a furious real estate developer stormed into the offices of an advance fee scammer in New Jersey.  The developer had just been scammed out a $200,000 "application fee."

The brawny developer pounded the face of the con man into bloody ground beef.  According to the paramedics, they could barely identify the face of the con man as human.

"Killer" Pug.  Haha!

Okay-okay, the above story never happened.  I just made it up to demonstrate a point.  The featured image of a pummeled person is actually just a "victim" wearing makeup.  Ha!  

But given the very real possibility of a beating, if you were an advance fee scammer, would you prominently display your actual office address?

Or would you simply use a P.O. Box?  Or perhaps - and I have definitely seen this before - would you provide no address on your website at all?  After all, who wants to to be pounded by an angry customer?

The advance fee scamming industry is huge.  Developers and commercial real estate borrowers get conned out of millions of dollars in "good faith deposits" or "application fees" every year.

These con men issue term sheets for very attractive commercial real estate loans.  The borrowers, desperate for a loan, steal from their mother's grocery money jar, to raise the immense application fee required by the "lender." 

Once the money is in the hands of the grubby little con man, the "lender," of course, stops returning any phone calls and emails.  No loan is ever forthcoming.  It is all a con.

Go ahead and steal from your mother's
grocery money.  The below training is that good.

Over the next few weeks, I hope to teach you other ways of these spotting these con men; but for now -

Any time a "lender" issues a term sheet with darned attractive terms, look at his website.  Does his website have a street address?  Does he even have an address at all?

"Danger, Will Robinson, danger!"  --  the Robot in the original Lost in Space TV series.

Last week I blogged on whether Albert Einstein believed in God.  Einstein said, "I am fascinated by Spinoza's Pantheism."  Who???  A loyal blog reader, Tom Harrier, wrote and explained it to me.

God according to Baruch de Spinoza

When Einstein gave lectures at U.S. universities, the question students asked him most was: Do you believe in God? And he always answered: I believe in the God of Spinoza.

Baruch de Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher considered one of the great rationalists of 17th century philosophy, along with Descartes.  According to Spinoza, God would say: “Stop praying. I want you to go out into the world and enjoy your life. I want you to sing, have fun and enjoy everything I've made for you."

“Stop going into those dark, cold temples that you built yourself and saying they are my house. My house is in the mountains, in the woods, rivers, lakes, beaches. That's where I live, and there I express my love for you."

“Stop blaming me for your miserable life; I never told you there was anything wrong with you or that you were a sinner or that your sexuality was a bad thing. Sex is a gift I have given you and with which you can express your love, your ecstasy, your joy. So don't blame me for everything that others made you believe."

“Stop reading alleged sacred scriptures that have nothing to do with me. If you can't read me in a sunrise, in a landscape, in the look of your friends, in your son's eyes—you will find me in no book!"

“Stop asking me, ‘Will you tell me how to do my job?’ Stop being so scared of me. I do not judge you or criticize you, nor get angry or bothered. I am pure love."

“Stop asking for forgiveness, there's nothing to forgive. If I made you, I filled you with passions, limitations, pleasures, feelings, needs, inconsistencies, and best of all, free will. Why would I blame you if you respond to something I put in you? How could I punish you for being the way you are, if I'm the one who made you? Do you think I could create a place to burn all my children who behave badly for the rest of eternity? What kind of god would do that?"

“Respect your peers, and don't give what you don't want for yourself. All I ask is that you pay attention in your life—alertness is your guide."

“My beloved, this life is not a test, not a step on the way, not a rehearsal, not a prelude to paradise. This life is the only thing here and now—and it is all you need."

“I have set you absolutely free, no prizes or punishments, no sins or virtues, no one carries a marker, no one keeps a record.  You are absolutely free to create in your life. It’s you who creates heaven or hell."

Ooo, I'm in trouble now.  Haha!

Mortgage Banker Wealth is All About
Loan Servicing Rights.

“Live as if there is nothing beyond this life, as if this is your only chance to enjoy, to love, to exist. Then you will have enjoyed the opportunity I gave you. And if there is an afterlife, rest assured that I won't ask if you behaved right or wrong, I'll ask, ‘Did you like it? Did you have fun? What did you enjoy the most? What did you learn?’"

“Stop believing in me; believing is assuming, guessing, imagining. I don't want you to believe in me, I want you to believe in you. I want you to feel me in you when you kiss your beloved, when you tuck in your little girl, when you caress your dog, when you bathe in the sea."

“Stop praising me. What kind of egomaniac God do you think I am? I'm bored with being praised. I'm tired of being thanked. Feeling grateful? Prove it by taking care of yourself, your health, your relationships, the world. Express your joy! That's the way to praise me."

Hahahaha!

Is there a nice way to say, "You are brain dead
if you don't invest a lousy $29?"

“Stop complicating things and repeating as a parrot what you've been taught about me. Why do you need more miracles? So many explanations?
“The only thing for sure is that you are here, that you are alive, that this world is full of wonders.”

The above is what Albert Einstein believed.

For myself, I will keep praying and thanking God for this beautiful world and this wonderful life, with my lovely wife of 40 years and my three great kids.  I will continue to beg Jesus, in whom I believe, to please forgive me and advocate for me when it ends.  Heaven knows I am an unworthy bum.  :-/

Albert Einstein was once asked if he believed in God.  His answer was interesting:

"I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I do not reply with a parable?

The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues.

The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written."

"The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God.

We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. 

I am fascinated by Spinoza's Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things."

-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955), as mentioned in Glimpses of the Great by G. S. Viereck (1930), paraphrased in Walter Isaacsson's Einstein: His Life and Universe

I saw this analysis on LinkedIn or X recently, so I thought I'd share.  I can't find the author again to give him credit.  Sorry.

What happened to NY Community Bank yesterday? The stock was $10 in January, yesterday it dropped below $2 (an 80% drop from January). An investor group led by former Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin injected $1B of capital, removed all legacy board members, and replaced the CEO Allesandro DiNello (who had the job less than a week) with Joseph Otting, former head of the OCC. The stock popped back up to ~$4 on the news.

This is a $100B bank, not some mom-and-pop shop. It's turning into a convention of ex-government officials too.

Plus, this isn't Mnuchin's first rodeo rescuing a failing bank. In 2009, with an FDIC assist, he swooped in and bought IndyMac. He eventually made hundreds of millions when he sold IndyMac to CIT Group. Which leads to the question: Why did this happen?

NYCB bought Flagstar in 2022. Flagstar has an excellent mortgage servicing platform with about $300B in loan servicing. This has a high value and can be sold; but if I'm understanding this correctly (please chime in if I'm misinformed), the fact that Moody's downgraded NYCB to below-investment-grade significantly limits their capital market flexibility.

Without an investment grade credit rating, banks aren't allowed to hold escrow balances for conventional or government loans. If that's true, I think they have to sell the Flagstar loan servicing business.

And why did they get downgraded?

NYCB's big problem is its $40B multifamily CRE portfolio, made up mostly of rent-controlled apartments. In 2019, Governor Kathy Hochul signed the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA) into law. Per Chris Whalen, "...all banks in New York that hold rent stabilized assets on the books are now considered impaired... several banks in New York City may fail as a result."

What did this rent control law do that is so onerous?

Well, I think the gist of it is this: if a renter leaves an apartment, the landlord has no right - no right - to raise the rent on that apartment for a new tenant more than 2%. The law prior to 2019 was a max 20% increase.

This law dis-incentivizes landlords from investing any capital to improve the look and feel of apartment buildings. They will just sit there and deteriorate, and drop in value.

Think about it: why would you put any money into an existing building if you can't pass on the expense into higher rents to new tenants? It's not worth it.

So it's a Law of Unintended Consequences situation. A law passed to benefit renters will slowly deteriorate living standards for renters. Investors will sell and leave NYC and move to a location where they have the freedom to pursue profits.

Puts the whole NYCB / Signature Bank situation in a new light, right?