The current environment looks similar in many ways to the one that launched RELA in 1992. "The organization was started in that down market by lenders who felt they needed a venue to network, help each other find positions and come to terms with what was happening during that real estate crisis," says RELA VP Larney Bisbano.

The intervening years, which saw RELA become widely recognized for its educational series and expand to three other cities, were mostly boom times by comparison, Bisbano says. "Not since the early '90s have we had to grapple with the sort of environment that has brought us back to where we started."

RELA's 2008-2009 membership had already been set in stone when the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy filing and a slew of other earth-shaking events signaled a deep downturn in the credit markets and commercial real estate in general. RELA's leadership knew that coming into the 2009-2010 membership year, which began this past June, "we were going to lose a ton of members, and also some sponsors" as a result of the economic crisis, Bisbano says. "We knew that we would have to change our programming to address that. We had to consider the fact that a lot of people weren't going to be able to expense things the way they did before, and that we needed more programming just to keep the membership interested and feel there was some value for the money."

Their strategy was to begin the fall programming season with a bang, says RELA president Kip Sanford. That meant lining up the season's first four speakers, and a slate of networking events, well in advance—and getting the word out as early as possible so that members had the information top of mind when they returned from late-summer vacations. "Having all this programming in place, we really came out with a splash, saying 'look what we're doing and look at the benefits of membership,'" Sanford says. It also helped with lining up sponsors for the year.

Following a Sept. 16 panel on loan restructuring, RELA brought in Adam Metz, CEO of General Growth Properties, who gave a candid assessment of the outlook for retail. "That was a big draw for us, because a lot of the people in that room had been lenders to GGP," says Bisbano. "You can have certain people come and speak when the markets are good. Given the current environment, what better than to have the CEO of a major company going through a creditor workout?"

Although RELA's leadership doesn't direct speakers toward their topics, the speakers often ask for input on what members want to know about. "All bankers are dealing with troubled assets in some form," Sanford says. "So a lot of the concepts we were familiar with, pre-downturn, we're now becoming experts on. But as an industry, we're still managing good assets as well as bad, good relationships as well as troubled and sometimes very adversarial relationships. The industry is still wearing many hats and there's still learning and great interest in gathering information on the outcomes of other deals and other situations."

It's the kind of information they can't get from a daily newspaper, Samford says. "From a lender's standpoint, there's just not enough there," he says. "If you're a general schmo, you read it and think there's a lot of information, but if you're a lender you want to dive much deeper." For example, the restructuring panel this past September, which featured experts that ranged from ratings agencies to CMBS underwriters, "really got into the details. That's the kind of topic people want to hear about."

In the current environment, "you can only talk about the acquisition environment for so long, because there really isn't one," Sanford says. "It's less about who's buying what than about people managing their way out of the current situation, and all the particulars behind it."

With that said, the content going into this year is more forward-looking than it was last fall, when both the Boston and Washington, DC chapters also offered restructuring panels. Bisbano comments, "People have had their fill of 911-crisis topics and maybe want to know where the economy is headed or what the new strategies are for developers and owners, as opposed to looking back over the disaster and destruction we've had for the past 18 or 24 months."

Launching a podcast series, of which Fascitelli's will be the first, is one of several ways RELA hopes to provide more content and thereby value to members. One web-based technique they'll be rolling out is conducting "snap polls" among members, featuring multiple-choice questions about the issues of the day. For the larger real estate community, "We hope to be able to answer questions about the marketplace directly from our members' responses" to the polls, Bisbano says. "We want to make more use of that, so that RELA is not only an educational and networking platform, but perhaps also a voice for the real estate lending community."

Instant Insights /

Lenders Association Sweetens Pot for Members

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