Secondary Market

Tom MacManus, a 30-year industry veteran, has been appointed as president and COO of Boca Raton, Florida-based ARA Finance, a joint venture of Apartment Realty Advisors (ARA) and CWCapital, LLC. MacManus will be responsible for the strategic development of the venture's national multifamily lending platform, which provides service through ARA's 19 offices located across the country.

USAA Real Estate Company, a San Antonio-based company that provides fund and separate account investments for corporate and institutional investors, recently announced a new investment partnership with Houston-based Crimson Real Estate Fund, LP, to acquire, develop, and reposition real estate opportunities in key growth markets across the United States.

San Francisco-based LoopNet, Inc., a commercial real estate information services provider, recently announced the acquisition of Centennial, Colorado-based Reaction Web, an online solutions company focused in the commercial real estate industry. Reaction Web brings state-of-the-art custom Web sites, deal rooms, and private property marketing tools to LoopNet's suite of solutions.

With financing in the commercial real estate sector severely constricted and billions in multifamily mortgages on the verge of coming due, Freddie Mac is stepping up to the plate to ensure strapped apartment owners have an avenue to refinance their debt. The GSE has launched a new lending program that allows mezzanine debt on qualifying multifamily first mortgages. Freddie officials say the initiative will reduce the number of properties that may otherwise become defaults, drawn-out workouts, or foreclosures.

Encore Equities, a subsidiary of Dallas-based Encore Enterprises, Inc., recently appointed Jeremiah Sunden as VP of capital markets. He will be responsible for cultivating Encore's investor network and identifying projects that meet the company's investment criteria.

Commercial real estate firm Signature Associates has launched a new business unit to help property owners secure mortgage term extensions, mortgage workouts, and refinancing in today's challenging marketplace.

The real estate outlook for the remainder of 2010 is grim. According to a recent online survey of real estate executives conducted by Deloitte, 76 percent of executives expect commercial property values to continue to fall this year, and 73 percent predict asking rents will follow the same trend. When the market will recover still remains unknown, but it will undoubtedly take time. This was echoed by survey respondents, with 92 percent predicting that it will be at least two to four years - some say even longer - before we see a full market recovery.

The Association of Mortgage Investors recently released a detailed set of guiding principles to Congress and regulators for how to overhaul the beleaguered securitization market in a manner that will ensure private sector demand for mortgages in the future, which the association says is crucial to the recovery of the global economy.

Economic factors, such as unemployment and consumers' controlled spending, continue to weigh heavy on the commercial real estate sector and drag down fundamentals, but the rate of deterioration appears to be moderating, the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) said Wednesday. The volume of commercial property sales picked up at the end of last year and prices are beginning to show stabilization, but MBA also noted that vacancy rates continue to increase across all property types and delinquencies are still climbing.

The Federal Reserve's role as buttress and benefactor of the nation's mortgage debt market came to an end Wednesday. Since November 2008, the central bank has been the market's No. 1 patron, buying up $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed securities. Fears have surfaced that the Fed's exit could leave a gaping hole in the secondary market, causing interest rates for home loans to spike and buyer demand to dwindle. But analysts say private investors will pick up the slack and rates will rise less than a quarter of a percentage point over the next quarter.