Secondary Market

Veros Real Estate Solutions, a Santa Ana, California-based provider of enterprise risk management and collateral valuation services, announced Thursday that the company has adopted the American Securitization Forum (ASF) Loan Identification Number Code (ASF LINC).

Despite negative reports regarding commercial real estate, this down market may be a window of opportunity for investors. According to the CCIM Institute and the Real Estate Research Corporation (RERC), commercial real estate is positioning itself to be an attractive investment on a risk-adjusted basis in 2010 and 2011. Property prices in the retail and apartment sectors, in particular, showed moderate increases in the fourth quarter of 2009, breaking the string of significant price declines during the previous 12 months.

Lincoln Shores, a 631-unit apartment property in St. Petersburg, Florida, was recently acquired in a joint venture by Charleston, South Carolina-based Greystar Real Estate Partners and The Praedium Group, headquartered in New York. ""We are pleased to be entering into our first joint venture with Greystar, an exceptionally experienced and dynamic organization, and we look forward to future opportunities with them,"" said David Dowell, VP at Praedium.

The Federal Reserve offered its most upbeat economic outlook in nearly a year at the conclusion of its two-day policy meeting Wednesday, but again voted to maintain the benchmark federal funds rate at near-zero. Policymakers also made it clear that they are sticking to their plan of pulling back from the secondary market, with the program to purchase mortgage-backed securities (MBS) coming to a close on March 31, as scheduled.

Federal banking regulators issued a final risk-based capital rule last week outlining how lenders are to account for assets, including mortgages that have been repackaged and sold to investors. Mortgage-backed securities (MBS) had previously been excluded from banks' balance sheets, but new industry-wide accounting standards force lenders to move these securitized assets back onto their books.

Nationstar Mortgage LLC has announced that loan-level data is now available online to its securities investors. The detailed data covers more than $7 billion of mortgage loans Nationstar services.

Real estate developer Tishman Speyer and money manager BlackRock, Inc. said Monday that they are returning the Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village complexes to creditors. The decision comes just weeks after Tishman Speyer and BlackRock withheld their $16.1 million payment from debt holders in an attempt to force the special servicer to restructure the loans.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank says he will be recommending Congress close the doors on the government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and rebuild the nation's housing finance system from ground zero. According to Frank, who has long been one of the GSEs' biggest proponents on Capitol Hill, the two firms cannot continue in their current form and his committee plans to propose killing off the enterprises completely rather than taking a ""piecemeal"" approach to their restructuring.

The number of regional bank closures has already begun to pick up speed. Regulators have shuttered five more community-based financial institutions - in Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington. The FDIC is making moves that indicate it expects another year of elevated bank closings. The agency is opening a satellite office in suburban Chicago to help manage receiverships and liquidate assets from failed institutions in the Midwest, similar to offices it has already set up in California and Florida.

Although the economy seems to be on the mend, the commercial real estate market is still facing an uphill battle. To provide information and insight into the challenges and opportunities of the commercial real estate industry in the state of Ohio, Smith Realty Partners recently released its annual Smith Report, and the firm conducted the Central Ohio Commercial Real Estate Survey as part of the report.