Carlton Brings $500M in Loan Sales to Market

NEW YORK CITY-Investment banking firm Carlton Advisory Services says it’s marketing about $500 million in commercial, residential loans and single-family REO homes for sale in four separate offerings. Currently, the loans and REO offerings include a $91-million portfolio in commercial and residential A and D construction loans for a California-based lender.

Indicative bids for the $91-million group were due Thursday, “and final bids are due a week after that” for the group, Carlton’s managing director, Thom McCarthy, tells GlobeSt.com. “This is primarily a California portfolio of commercial loans of various types with a concentration of broken condo deals and land development loans.”,p>Also included under the $500-million umbrella is a $100-million discounted senior mezzanine loan secured by a Class A Manhattan office tower, which McCarthy couldn’t disclose. There are also another $100 million in single-family REO located in a dozen different states that will be broken into pools, $30 million of land and commercial A and D loans in the Southeast and another $150 million in commercial and residential development loan assets concentrated in the Southeast and Midwest.

McCarthy tells GlobeSt.com that $200 million of the loan group is negotiated and is facilitated between a targeted buyer and a very large financial institution. He says his company is selling, on behalf of a bank, an REO pool approaching $100 million.

Overall, McCarthy says his market is thriving right now. He adds that the company has in fact, turned down business.

“We want to make sure that sellers approach with reasonable expectations and we want to make sure we’re matching what I think the market bears with seller expectations,” McCarthy says. “I think they’re happy I’m candid with them.” He adds that he has no shortage of buyers, offering yet another clue that capital is out there.

“The number of buyers is outstanding,” says McCarthy, adding that “buyers can get solid yields, but I don’t think they can do it on conservative scenarios without something to add to the situation.” Examples, he says, would include “the retail player who knows all the potential tenants for the building, or the developer who’s familiar with the submarket and is taking over an acquisition and development loan where he actually sees the math and evolved exit.”

For this reason, McCarthy says, lining up buyers is “more of a matching, You’ll get a lot of bids on every asset, but the way you bridge the bid-ask gap nowadays and have a value equation for our clients is to actually match people with what they’re looking for.”

Lately, McCarthy says Carlton has been selling “a lot of condo deals where the condos didn’t sell. A lot of those are now multifamily operators buying, people who can really get in there and do something productive with the property.”