No Money for Good Deals?

cash No Money for Good Deals?

Bloomberg reported from their Dealmakers Summit in New York that the commercial real estate market is crowded with deals but that no one is closing.  The same day of this announcement, Norman Sturner and Crown Acquisitions purchased a Fifth Avenue Tower with 500,000 square feet and Savanna, a real estate private-equity firm purchased 31 Penn Plaza with 444,000 square feet near Madison Square Garden.

This comes at a time when there is also plenty of financing for other private-equity deals like United Technologies' acquisition of Goodrich Corp for $16.4BB that included unsolicited potential financing offers north of $100BB.  With this amount of capital flowing for other private-equity deals, how come only some of these dollars are flowing to real estate and more deals aren't getting done?

As we've seen with a number of large banks recently, most of these traditional Commercial Real Estate loans were not performing to where they should have been as a result of the bubble that burst in 2007-2008 due to inflated property values.  Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) just announced the liquidation of $880MM at a 20-25% discount as they both streamline their operations but also seek to clear their balance sheet, but is this a trend that is going to continue for retail and consumer banks to leave the commercial real estate space and leave it open for the private-equity shops?

Some of the values of commercial properties have come down but most investors, including investment banks , private-equity and investors, are just looking for assets with less risk and stable profits.  Is this something we can attribute short-term to those folks getting burned in 2007-2008 or is this the future of getting commercial real estate deals done?

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