Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Jesse Holshouser – Repeating The Same Cycle?


Jesse Holshouser is the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Silver Capital, a real estate investment and development firm. Jesse gave us an insider prospective on real estate capital markets from the 1970s to his outlook on the future on the CMBS market.

In the 1970s the banking in general was much more simplistic than present times. Banks would acquire capital from depositors buy offering the depositor a rate at which they would earn a risk free return for keeping their money deposited in their bank. The bank would then lend at a higher rate to a borrower to which the bank would make the spread. The bank would hold on to the loan they made till maturity and their for would be extremely risk adverse as they would be the ones holding the note until maturity.

This led to what Jesse referred to as the “mortgage revolution”, where mortgages were bundled together and sold. The process was a mortgage broker or bank would draw up and fund the loan, then the bank would bundle and sell the mortgages to the investment community. Government Sponsored Entities (GSEs) such as Freddie and Fannie Mac would ultimately secure the loans for a fee of course, making the investment community be less fearful of a possible default.

This practice led to banks and everyone related in the real estate and banking industry to enter into a full fledged frenzy. The banks would write pretty much any loan they could with out fear of default, as they would sell the loans as soon as they would write them. This was a game all about fees.

As we all now know this came to a halt in housing recession to which most of the nation still feels effects of what took place seven years ago. Jesse points out that many of the indicators are beginning to look like 2005 all over again.

The past is always a great predictor of the future, however lets hope we learned out lesson.

No comments:

Post a Comment