Industry Standards

I headed into San Francisco this morning for the opening session of the 95th Annual Mortgage Bankers Association Conference and was subjected to a group of protesters objecting to the bailout, foreclosures and mortgage bankers in general.

What a poignant reminder how badly the mortgage crisis is hitting folks and how great the responsibility is to get the right fixes in place.
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Politics and the CMBS industry have become sudden (and strange) bedfellows, but recent developments may help bring open transparency to both parties.

The Department of the Treasury recently issued an RFP titled “Notice to Financial Institutions Interested in Providing Whole Loan Asset Management Services for a Portfolio of Troubles Mortgage-Related Assets.”

This is a huge opportunity.
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In May at the MBA tech conference in Chicago, I laid out the CMBS.com master plan to Mike Lipson of Capmark, a major master servicer and traditional mortgage broker. I have known Mike since GMAC bought Hanford/Healy in 1996 (where I worked before founding GateCapital) but he had not heard of the CMBS.com name (we have been known simply as Backshop).

Lipson said I should change the name of the company because CMBS has such a bad connotation.
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To have the need for 2.0 of anything, by definition, 1.0 could have been better.

Certainly that was the case with many of the internet’s first sites, and it is the case with Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities.
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There is no question that the way in which we have conducted securitizations in the past is broken.

I agree with Ethan Penner (in his July 10, 2008 Opinion Article in the WSJ, The Future of Securitization) when he says “Yesterday’s business model has been invalidated.” However, I do not agree with his conclusion that securitization can survive “with a simple tweak.”
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