Industry Standards

I was re-elected to the Commercial Board of Governors of MISMO for another two-year term, so I will remain active in MISMO at least through 2013. MISMO, which stands for the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organizations (www.mismo.org), is a standard-making body run by MERS and owned by the MBA.

I have been active in MISMO because I believe commercial real estate deals should have a standard XML data set that is comprehensive enough to understand and value the deal.

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I attended a CREFC mini-conference in New York this week titled “2010 Market Initiatives: Overview and Updates.”

The half-day session provided an update on financial regulatory reform and CREFC’s efforts to improve transparency outside SEC directives by creating industry consensus.

Some of the results are good, some are not good.

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For the first time in years, CREFC has proposed an increase in data disclosure by proposing a new report, the Loan Modification Report, to be effective Dec. 1, 2010. It isn’t perfect, but it is progress.

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I helped draft letters from CREFC, MBA and MISMO to the SEC commenting on the proposed Regulation AB changes. The letters were filed Aug. 2. While all of them supported the concept of transparency, none of them proposed a data list to actually achieve transparency.

So I also wrote my own letter.

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With great fanfare today, President Obama signed the financial reform bill into law. Many times over the past several months, I thought this legislation would die, but this is a big, important deal. And now the law is clear: Transparency is required for securitized products.

The big question is whether the SEC enacts rules and regulations to actually bring about transparency.

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