Working With Lenders – A Developer's Perspective

As we valiantly work our way out of this Great Recession (something I consider to be more like a depression in the real estate world), we continue to see many developers being hounded by their lenders.

On the local level, most troubled loans are conventional loans funded by local lenders. We are yet to deal with the massive amount of CMBS (Conduit) loans that we anticipate will start coming due in 2012 with increasing amounts continuing to mature over the next five years. Accordingly, and while our experience to date has not been promising, the jury is still out on how it will be to deal with the special servicers controlling the Conduit market. What we do know is that special servicers are often unresponsive and refuse to devote sufficient attention to troubled loans. By way of example, even trying to get an assumption of a Conduit loan approved is a long, tedious process involving frequent resending of information previously submitted.