H&R's Five-Month Mortgage Volume Hits $156M but Hospitality Loans Still Off

MIAMI-Although his firm has booked $156.35 million in the first five months of the year and has a total $200 million in deals in the funding pipeline, Henry Rodstein, president of 19-year-old H&R Mortgage & Realty Co. has no illusions about the hospitality industry’s chances of garnering a healthy portion of those funds.

He says that except for a handful of specialty transactions, most lenders remain deaf to hotel/motel owners applying for loans when their properties are showing 50% to 60% occupancy levels and their cash flow stream is sagging.

“Most lenders look at the hospitality sector as a business, not actually as a real estate asset per se,” Rodstein tells GlobeSt.com in a telephone interview. “That means, at the end of the day, when the cash flow and occupancies of the business are down, there isn’t much chance for a mom and pop hotel/motel operator along Ocean Drive in Miami Beach, for example, to get a loan of any kind” yet.

Rodstein says the major hotel chains such as the Marriotts, Hiltons and the Starwoods have “a little better chance” of winning a loan than smaller operators but even the nationals are getting turned down by lenders who formally courted their business.

Rodstein says he has no crystal ball to tell him when the scenario will turn around for the hospitality industry, either.

“If the big boys do get a loan, you can be sure it will be a recourse loan and not a non-recourse loan,” the broker says.

On recourse loans, borrowers have to personally guarantee all or a large part of the funding. On non-recourse loans, the property itself is collateral for the loan.

In the heydays of the commercial real estate development blitz in the 1980s, almost every loan was non-recourse. When the bottom fell out of the real estate market by early 1990, lenders foreclosed and took back billions in unwanted properties.

Among Rodstein’s deals this year, his firm has found loan approvals for $1.5 million in permanent financing from UniBank for Bellegate Shopping Center, West Palm Beach; $4.5 million in land acquisition financing from Eastern National Bank to refinance the Blue Seas Hotel & Condominiums, Sunny Isles Beach, FL; $3 million in permanent financing from Peninsula Bank for Willow Lakes RV Park, Titusville, FL; $34.35 million in construction financing from Mellon United National Bank for the development of Harbour Centre, a class A office building in Aventura, FL; and $108 million in construction financing for the development of Setai, a luxury residential tower in Miami Beach.

H&R also handled the $4 million assemblage sale of four oceanfront properties in Deerfield Beach, FL.

Over the past 19 years, the Brickell Avenue brokerage has arranged $1 billion in loans to finance real estate deals valued at $3 million.