Fearing Losses, Banks Are Quietly Dumping Real Estate Loans - The New York Times

If landlords can’t pay back loans on office buildings, the lenders will suffer. Some banks are trying to avoid that fate. Credit... Chris Gash Supported by By Matthew Goldstein Matthew Goldstein covers Wall Street and real estate. Some Wall Street banks, worried that landlords of vacant and struggling office buildings won’t be able to pay off their mortgages, have begun offloading their portfolios of commercial real estate loans hoping to cut their losses. It’s an early but telling sign of the broader distress brewing in the commercial real estate market, which is hurting from the twin punches of high interest rates, which make it harder to refinance loans, and low occupancy rates for office buildings — an outcome of the pandemic. Late last year, an affiliate of Deutsche Bank and another German lender sold the delinquent mortgage on the Argonaut, a 115-year-old office complex in Midtown Manhattan, to the family office of the billionaire investor George Soros, according to court filings

If landlords can’t pay back loans on office buildings, the lenders will suffer. Some banks are trying to avoid that fate. Credit... Chris Gash Supported by By Matthew Goldstein Matthew Goldstein covers Wall Street and real estate. Some Wall Street banks, worried that landlords of vacant and struggling office buildings won’t be able to pay off their mortgages, have begun offloading their portfolios of commercial real estate loans hoping to cut their losses. It’s an early but telling sign of the broader distress brewing in the commercial real estate market, which is hurting from the twin punches