Romeo
EL SEGUNDO, CA-Locally based Partner Engineering has come up with what might be called a new metric for gauging the progress of the recovery. The company says the increase in the number of phase one environmental site assessments that it performs is an indicator that liquidity is returning to the markets.
Says Frank Romeo, principal and national client manager for partner, “The increase in our volume of work directly correlates to an increase in commercial loan originations.” Romeo continues,
“The number of ESA’s we performed during the first quarter of 2011 is up more than a 110% from the same quarter last year. We are doing much more work on conduit loans than we have in the recent past with the re-emergence of CMBS 2.0.” According to Romeo, the increase can be seen across all segments, but especially in the commercial office and retail sectors, which had been flat for nearly two years.
Gell
A phase one ESA is a report that identifies potential or existing environmental liabilities on commercial real estate, which is triggered by its purchase or refinancing, or by a lender who is providing a commercial real estate loan on the asset. “The increase in the number of ESAs by Partner, which performs more of these environmental reports than any other firm in the country, reflects a national trend,” the company says in an announcement regarding its findings.
Industry wide, more than 44,000 ESA’s were performed across the US in the first quarter of 2011, up 11% over the same quarter last year, according to the EDR Scorekeeper, the nationwide market monitor for the environmental due diligence industry. Partner principal Summer Gell comments on the findings: “Market conditions are improving and people are beginning to feel comfortable that they want to do the deal now. Equity partners and banks are seeing the bottom. Banks, who were holding troubled assets on their balance sheets, not sure what to do with them, are starting to find buyers.”
Gell, who is based in Dallas, also says that she has seen a dramatic pickup in Texas over the past six months on commercial, retail and industrial deals. According to the EDR Scorekeeper, Houston tallied the highest percentage of growth (78%) in ESAs from first quarter 2011 over the same period last year, followed by Seattle (59%), and Denver (49%).
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