Europe Braces for Abrupt Real Estate Reversal

(Bloomberg.) Turmoil at trophies in London and Frankfurt give a glimpse at the danger facing European real-estate investors as they confront the sharpest reversal of all time.

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From a fraught refinancing process for an office building in the City of London to the strained sale of the Commerzbank Tower in Germany’s financial hub, investors are scrambling to find ways to bridge financing gaps as lending markets seize up from rapidly rising interest rates.

In the coming weeks, lenders in Europe will be receiving results from their year-end appraisals. Low valuations could lead to breaches of loan covenants. This will trigger emergency funding measures, including forced sales and cash injections.

“Europe is going to go through the great unwind of 10 years of easy money,” Skardon Baker, a partner with Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm. “The amount of distress and dislocation is off the spectrum.”

Read more: Global Real Estate Market Faces $175 Billion Debt Spiral

Loans, bonds and other debt totaling about €1.9 trillion ($2.1 trillion) — nearly the size of the Italian economy — are secured against commercial property or extended to landlords in Europe and the UK, according to the European Banking Authority, a survey by Bayes Business School and data compiled by Bloomberg.

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Roughly 20% of that, or about €390 billion, will mature this year, and the looming crunch marks the first real test of regulations designed after the global financial crisis to contain real estate lending risks. These rules could make a correction more severe and abrupt.

“I think the revaluation will happen more quickly than in the past,” said John O’Driscoll, head of the real assets business of French insurer Axa SA’s investment management unit. “People are starting to get exposed as the tide goes out.”

Europe’s lenders will be prodded by the new regulations to act more aggressively on bad loans. They’re also in better shape than during the last real estate crisis more than a decade ago, so could be less inclined to allow issues to fester. This puts the burden on the borrowers.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, most banks were reluctant to call in bad loans as doing so would have led to huge losses — a practice dubbed “extend and pretend.” Lenders will now have to provide for accrued losses rather than expected under new rules regarding non-performing loans. This means that they are less likely to wait for asset values to recover and sit tight.

“The year end valuations done in the first quarter will be key,” said Ravi Stickney, managing partner and chief investment officer for real estate at Cheyne Capital, an alternative-investment fund manager that raised £2.5 billion for real estate lending last year. “The question mark is over what the banks actually do.”

So far valuations haven’t declined enough so that senior debt — the loans generally held by banks — are underwater, but that could soon change. CBRE Group Inc. reported a 13% drop in UK commercial property values last year. The decline was faster in the second half. CBRE Group Inc. recorded a 3% drop in December alone. Analysts at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. believe that the decline could reach 20%.

Banks may then take action before the prices fall further and risk losing credit, forcing landlords with high-interest loans to consider other options. Problems for people with debt maturities are more difficult. Lenders are reducing the amount of a property’s value they’re willing to loan out. A lower appraisal could lead to a double whammy and increase the funding gap.

“Bank appetite is lower and it will stay lower” until there’s sign the market has hit bottom, said Vincent Nobel, head of asset-based lending at Federated Hermes Inc. The new regulations encourage banks to take on bad loans. “and one way to solve problems is to make it somebody else’s problem.”

Sweden has been the center of the crisis so far, with home prices expected to fall 20% from their peak levels. The country’s listed property firms have lost 30% of their value over the past 12 months, and the Swedish central bank and Financial Supervisory Authority have repeatedly warned of the risks stemming from commercial property debt.

A fall in real estate values could lead to a “domino effect,” According to Anders Kvist (a senior adviser to director of FSA), distressed selling could be forced if there are more collateral demands.

Although there are pockets of stability, such as in Spain and Italy which were more severely hit by the global financial crisis than the UK, there are signs that the UK could soon be the next to fall.

The bright side is that there are more options for financially strapped property investors. Over the last decade, closed-ended credit funds and other entities have grown steadily. Collectively, insurers and other alternative lenders had a higher share of new UK real estate loans than the country’s major banks in the first half of last year, according to the Bayes survey.

Howard Lutnick, Cantor Fitzgerald Chief executive Officer, said that investors will be investing a record number of dollars in so-called opportunistic fund, which makes riskier real property bets over the next 18 month. This trend will assist in the acceleration of a recovery in commercial realty markets, he stated.

These new tools may make the turmoil shorter-lasting than it was in the past, when banks held onto bad loans for years. Louis Landeman, a credit analysis specialist at Danske Bank in Stockholm believes that the reset will be relatively smooth with borrowers being able to take appropriate counter measures.

“Anyone that can come up with a creative way of filling that gap is going to have a great time,” Mat Oakley, Savills’ head of commercial research, said:

With assistance from Anton Wilen and Damian Shepherd, Konrad Krasuski, Konrad Krasuski, Nicholas Comfort.

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