UK lending teams reconvening after the summer this autumn and scrutinizing unspent budgets will be looking warily with their credit committees at the challenge of successful deployment in Q4.
Most debt investors would acknowledge that there is simply not as much borrowing as appetite to lend in current market conditions. Limited requirement for secured loans against prime assets bought by overseas investors, and a highly liquid bond market for bigger borrowers, leaves senior lenders with reduced scope for business. Defending the book and harvesting further business from best relationships, at the expense of margin will probably be the story of 2017 for risk-averse banks and insurers, as it was last year.
Certainly, there are few signs that hunger to deploy is overruling risk appetite, and to that extent credit policy makers and risk controllers appear to have an effective handbrake on a peak market creep to poorer assets and looser covenanting to win market share.
Despite all the available liquidity in the debt market (bolstered behind the frontline by strong appetite from secondary investors such as pension funds and Asian banks), we often hear equity investors complain about the struggle to find lenders with latitude to structure loans supportively around an asset improvement plan.
Whilst clearers do still have budgets to fund development, it is limited to a small percentage of the book, and is largely directed at core clients, and de-risked assets, leaving ‘anything spec’ to hedge funds whose flexibility comes at a very high price. Therein lies both the difficulty, and opportunity created by current market conditions and the slightly blunt tool of regulation.
Debt market analysts have pointed to ‘tipping points’ where risk of default rose clearly with indiscriminate market correction during the GFC. Bank of America Merrill Lynch produced some excellent analysis of the drivers of CRE loan losses, highlighting cliffs equating broadly to LTV of 60%, ICRs of 2%x and debt yields at 10%, beyond which defaults rose markedly. Many lenders are now broadly regulated, or internally controlled around these sorts of assumptions.