SOURCE: Bloomberg

U.S. banks, battered by record losses from the worst housing slump since the Great Depression, now must weather increasing loan delinquencies from owners of skyscrapers and shopping malls.

The country’s 10 biggest banks have $327.6 billion in commercial mortgages, which face a wave of defaults as office vacancies grow and retailers and casinos go bankrupt.

“The only thing we are facing today in commercial real estate is the fact that we have a weakening economy,” Kovacevich, 65, said in a March 13 speech at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. “In a weakening economy, you have higher unemployment, you have fewer people who need to occupy office buildings, you have fewer retailers who need to exist.”

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SOURCE: Bloomberg

About $11 billion of defaulted or foreclosed commercial properties were being offered for sale last month as landlords struggled to refinance loans, Real Capital Analytics Inc. said.

About $5.7 billion worth of properties defaulted, were foreclosed upon or entered bankruptcy in February, the New York- based research firm said in a report today.

The situation “is likely to only worsen over the near term since behind the statistics are sellers that are rapidly morphing from pressured to distressed, while buyers are content to wait,” Real Capital analysts said.

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SOURCE: GlobeSt.com

Global information technology firm Unisys Corp. disposed of a 356,000-square-foot suburban Philadelphia office property in a $19.5-million sale-leaseback that closed late last year. But unlike your traditional sale-leaseback transaction, in which the seller continues to occupy the entirety of a facility, Unisys leased back only about half of the space at the Malvern, PA asset.

Such partial sale-leasebacks aren’t an entirely new phenomenon, but they appear to be on the rise, at a time when increased interest in sale-leasebacks in general is anticipated.

“A lot of corporations have identified that using a sale-leaseback is a great way to take capital they have tied up in real estate and invest that in their business,” says Jones Lang LaSalle capital markets senior vice president Suzanne Martinez, who along with managing director Mindy Berman and corporate solutions SVP Ken Zirk represented Unisys in its deal.

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