PODCAST: Trepp's Manus Clancy On Office Distress, The Debt Ceiling And The Ongoing Banking Crisis
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On this episode, we hear from Trepp Senior Managing Director Manus Clancy, a commercial real estate debt expert, about the tens of billions of dollars in loans maturing on both office and multifamily buildings this year, the state of lending amid the banking crisis and how much distress he sees in the office market.
"This is a period which is not unlike the mall space five years ago. In many ways, I think the outcomes will be quite similar,” Clancy said on the show. "The level of defaults will be significant, there will be properties valued at half today than they were 10 years ago, losses will be felt not only in the equity side, and the one part of the equation that has yet to be really told yet is in 2018 to 2022, mall owners really dug in and fought to keep their properties. We don't know what the behavior of the office owner will be yet. That part of the story remains very fluid."
He talked about last week’s news that Aby Rosen's RFR has reportedly secured a multiyear extension for the loan on the Seagram Building at 375 Park Ave. The almost $1B loan was the largest maturing CMBS loan in New York City this year, and Clancy said the extension is both a positive and negative for the market.
He also discussed the news last week that the Federal Reserve now views commercial real estate debt as a risk to the broader financial system, plus the impacts of Congress and the White House's standoff over the debt ceiling, with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warning that the U.S. could start defaulting on some obligations next month, which she said would be a "catastrophe."
“If we really get up to the eleventh hour and there is no deal, I think that you will see volatility spike and the equity markets sell off,” Clancy said. “And should we cross that Rubicon and see a default, there's really no telling how haywire the markets get. It's like one of those B movies, like Ghostbusters, where we crossed the lasers. Nobody's ever done that before, and you're not sure where that takes you. I tend to think that sometimes the fear gets the best of us, but ... we really don't know what's on the other side.”
