Wit Solberg founded Mission Peak Capital in 2008 to snap up messy commercial real-estate assets after the last big crisis.
“What I feel will happen,” said Solberg, is that COVID will make already complex discussions between real-estate borrowers and lenders “more complicated over the next five to seven years.” Mound Street oversees about $12 billion in assets in the U.S., but closer to $95 billion globally, with a focus on debt investments. Before 2008, Solberg ran Deutsche Bank’s commercial real-estate debt products syndicate desk in Asia.
This chart breaks down by asset class the nearly $20 billion of U.S. commercial property loans in “conduit” mortgage-bond deals that have piled into “special servicing” since the pandemic first forced business to shutter in March 2020. Special servicers often are paid a fee of 0.25% per annum based on the loan balance, for each month they oversee a loan, according to loan workout specialist Ann Hambly, who wrote a blog post in January about backlogs at special servicers due to COVID. Some servicers also offer flat-fee arrangements.