(Read More: Housing Recovery Leaves Some Behind)

“I don’t buy it,” said Mark Hanson, a California-based housing analyst. “Yes, the investor will give them a chance to bid on it, but in this market Wall Street will put the houses on the MLS in hopes of a bidding war.”

Home prices are already moving higher across the nation, largely due to a severe lack of for-sale supply. Miller is unconcerned about the swift price increases and points to a mortgage credit thaw as a counter-balance.

(Read More: Home Buyers Are Back, but Where Are the Houses?)

The big banks say it is not so much a thaw on their side as improving consumer balance sheets.

“Credit standards haven’t changed in terms of solid fundamentals around income and documentation,” said Kevin Watters, CEO of mortgage banking at JPMorgan Chase. “What has changed a little bit: Consumers’ balance sheets have improved, so their debt is down.”

Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100558148

(Read More: Housing Recovery Leaves Some Behind)

The jumbo securitization market is tiny, however, as most jumbo loans are still held on bank balance sheets. There are so far just two players in jumbo securitizations, Redwood Trust Inc. and very recently Credit Suisse Group AG, although others, including JPMorgan Chase, are preparing to join them.

There were no jumbo securitizations at all between 2008 and 2010. When Redwood dipped its toes in, securitizations totaled less than $1 billion in 2010-2011. By 2012 they hit $3.5 billion, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, and are already at $2 billion so far for 2013. Hebron believes they could surge dramatically in the very near future.

The rebirth of jumbo securitizations is being driven not just by investor confidence, but by growth in jumbo originations, which increased after the conforming loan limit was lowered. Originations of non-agency jumbo mortgages jumped by over 19 percent in 2012 from 2011, according to Inside Mortgage Finance.

So why is the conforming-jumbo spread shrinking? Not because jumbo rates are falling but because conforming rates are rising due in part to government intervention.

“Congress keeps raiding the guarantee fees (g-fees) Fannie and Freddie charge lenders in the securitization process for other purposes, like funding payroll tax cuts,” noted Hebron. “For each 10 basis point hike in g-fees, we’ve seen consumer rates rise about 0.125 percent.

Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100543189

“When we began the Independent Foreclosure Review, the OCC pledged to fix what was broken, identify who was harmed, and compensate them for that injury,” said Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry in a written statement. “While today’s announcement represents a significant change in direction, it meets those original objectives by ensuring that consumers are the ones who will benefit, and that they will benefit more quickly and in a more direct manner.”

The banks, including Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, will make $3.5 billion in direct payments to borrowers and $5.2 billion in other assistance, such as loan modifications and forgiveness of deficiency judgments. Four other banks, EverBank, Ally, HSBC and One West, were involved in the talks but did not sign the deal. Together they service close to half a million loans. The OCC says conversations with them continue.

All 3.8 million borrowers, designated as those who were in any stage of foreclosure in 2009 or 2010, will receive something, regardless if they were wronged in any way, according to federal regulators. The loan servicers will divide borrowers into eleven different categories, and the regulators will designate a standard payment for each category.

Bank of America’s share will be the largest at just under $3 billion in direct payments and borrower assistance. Bank of America took on the ills of Countrywide Financial.

“We support the new approach because it expands the number of borrowers who will receive payment, speeds the delivery of those payments, and will provide support for homeowners still struggling to make payments and encourages continued community stabilization efforts and recovery of the housing market,” said Bank of America spokesman Dan Frahm.

This settlement follows a $25 billion deal last year with many of the same mortgage servicers and state attorneys general. So far that has resulted in nearly $22 billion in consumer relief and $4.2 billion pending to 300,000 borrowers through the end of September, roughly $84,385 per homeowner. (Read More: Forty States Sign On to Foreclosure ‘Robo’ Settlement.)

Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100359672

Except this parking lot, at Howard and First streets in San Francisco, is located in one of the hottest commercial real estate markets in the country.

Late last week, New York’s Tishman Speyer Properties closed escrow on the space, which, by the end of next year will be transformed into a 10-story, 286,000-square-foot office building serving “tech tenant demands and needs perfectly,” said Allen Palmer, managing director at Tishman Speyer’s San Francisco office, in an e-mail to Bay Area real estate brokers.

Two distinguishing aspects of the deal: It’s the first “spec development” (i.e. built from the ground up with no signed tenants) in the city since the onset of the recession in 2007, and no debt financing is involved. The land, architectural plans and construction costs – the latter estimated between $180 million and $185 million – is “funded with all equity,” said Palmer.

“Tishman has just turned on the light switch,” said Daniel Cressman, executive vice president at Grubb Ellis, suggesting that San Francisco’s tech-driven market, especially in the South of Market area, may see similar deals in the near future. (Grubb Ellis, which was recently acquired by New York’s BCG Partners, is not involved in the Tishman Speyer deal.)

In fact, Tishman Speyer cut an even bigger spec deal at 222 Second St., which is also a parking lot. Scheduled to begin construction next year and to be open for tenants in the fall of 2014, the “world-class” $100 million, 27-story, 452,000-square-foot high-rise is “purposely designed … to cater to the tech user, yet also appeal to the professional, traditional office space user,” said Palmer.

Partnering with Tishman Speyer in both deals is JPMorgan Chase Asset Management, which bought a majority stake in China Basin Landing in January for $415 million. Like Tishman Speyer, which owns 555 Mission St., another spec project, and Infinity Towers, the upscale condo complex on Spear Street, JPMorgan has identified South of Market as the place to be.

“The demand is relentless, especially for tech space,” said Michael Covarrubias, CEO of TMG Partners, which is putting the finishing touches on the retrofit of 1275 Market St., a 17-story office building across the road from Twitter’s soon-to-be-occupied new headquarters.

The space at Howard and First streets is part of the 1.2 million-square-foot Foundry Square development, originally designed for Sun Microsystems. Three architecturally similar 10-story buildings are occupied by Oracle, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington Sutcliffe and BlackRock, the global investment management company.

The fully leased BlackRock building reportedly has been sold for $240 million by another New York property company to the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio. A second Foundry building, owned by Utah Retirement Systems and leased to Oracle, was put on the market in February, with a reported asking price in the $185 million range, “or just shy of an eye-popping $800 per square foot,” according to Real Estate Alert, an online newsletter.

“Our initial goal is to find one tenant” for the space at Howard and First streets, Palmer told potentially interested brokers. “But don’t let that goal get in your client’s way if they would like to pursue part of the building.”

Buyers’ market: If San Francisco real estate is a little too rich for your blood, how about Oakland? Home sales are up, especially in the condo market, and property developers are keen to show you their wares.

A number of developers and real estate firms, including Holliday Development and Uptown Place, are part of a monthlong business campaign called Passport Oakland, designed to entice folks to experience a city that has had some not-so-good press lately. Five “new home communities” are available for inspection, plus neighborhood tours. Barbecues, wine tasting, deals on meals and $100 gift-card prizes are among other incentives.

More information at passportoakland.com and on Facebook (Facebook.com/PassportOAK) and Twitter (#PassportOAK).

Andrew S. Ross is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Blogging at www.sfgate.com/columns/bottomline. Facebook page: sfg.ly/doACKM. Tweeting: @andrewsross. E-mail: bottomline@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page D – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/04/09/BUET1O0RN2.DTL&type=tech

Pamela Lakey, SSL Law Firm partner

Image: Hillary Jones-Mixon/The Recorder

As the real estate recovery hobbles along, partners at SSL Law Firm are surprisingly upbeat.

During the worst of the downturn, older San Francisco land use and real estate firms like Cassidy Shimko Dawson Kawakami and Ellman Burke Hoffman Johnson folded and big firms have shed lawyers from their real estate departments. By contrast, the 10-year-old real estate-focused SSL boutique has notched its biggest gains. Five lawyers joined the San Francisco firm from Ellman Burke at the start of 2010. Since then, six more have joined from bigger firms.

With a total of 26 attorneys, SSL has grown into among the biggest real estate groups housed in the Bay Area. “SSL is a counter-trend,” Orrick, Herrington Sutcliffe real estate partner Michael Liever said. “They’ve really carved out a nice niche for themselves.”

The firm boasts marquee public company clients like Apple Inc., Salesforce.com, JPMorgan Chase and Boston Properties, and recently had a hand in big deals like the Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment project and Facebook Inc.’s move to Sun Microsystems Inc.’s old Menlo Park, Calif., campus. The partners acknowledge they don’t draw Big Law paychecks, but say they have a lot more control over their professional and personal lives.

SSL was founded in 2001 by three in-house counsel from Spieker Properties. Sara Steppe was general counsel and Pamela Lakey and Dana Stone were associate GCs. When Spieker merged with Equity Office Properties, the trio opted not to relocate to Chicago, deciding instead to open their own shop: Steppe, Stone Lakey. Equity Office Properties was their first client.

Lakey, whose career trajectory included two years at Steefel, Levitt Weiss and two at Brobeck, Phleger Harrison, said the plan was to build on the firm’s leasing work foundations and become what she calls a full-service real estate firm, handling land use, environmental, bankruptcy and other real estate-related matters. She said she had no idea it would happen so suddenly, though. “We thought we’d gradually hand-select people who worked with our model — business lawyers and deal makers,” said Lakey, who has been co-managing SSL with Sally Shekou since the firm’s early days. “But the change in the Ellman Burke firm turned out to be good fortune for us.”

Though the firm is small, SSL lawyers routinely appear opposite Big Law attorneys. In the Facebook deal announced earlier this year, SSL, led by Lakey and Shekou, represented property manager RREEF. Attorneys from Orrick; Paul, Hastings, Janofsky Walker and others handled various other aspects of the deal. SSL handles commercial leasing for Apple and is starting to handle retail leasing for the company, led by partners Jodi Fedor and Lisa Maxwell.

The firm also has been adding renewable energy clients, with partner Christine Griffith handling matters for NextEra Energy Resources Inc. in the Montezuma II Wind Energy Project in Solano County, for example.

SSL is also one of the largest women-owned firms anywhere. Although Steppe and Stone have retired from the firm, nine of its 11 partners are female.

The firm waited a few years before becoming certified as women-owned. Kyla Chin, who joined the firm from Morrison Foerster, said the partners wanted to get established first. “We didn’t want to be stigmatized by it,” she said. Certification by Astra Women’s Business Alliance in 2005 helped the firm land work from utilities ATT and PGE Co., partners said.

SSL’s exclusive focus on real estate is distinctive, said Shartsis Friese real estate partner David Kremer, who worked opposite the firm on the Facebook deal. “The fact that they have chosen to limit their practice only to real estate is unusual,” he said. “I don’t think that exists anymore.”

Kremer said Bonnie Frank’s and Jeffrey Ebstein’s The Real Estate Law Group in Sausalito follows a similar model, but that firm has only six attorneys. In San Francisco, 26-lawyer Greene Radovsky Maloney Share Hennigh and 35-lawyer Stein Lubin have a strong real estate focus, but handle other matters like securities, tax and business services. The same is true for 50-lawyer Miller Starr Regalia in Walnut Creek.

Kremer said SSL also stands out for the amount of experience each partner has. “Most of their lawyers all had many years of real estate practice under their belt elsewhere before they joined SSL,” he said. “It’s a unique collection of people.”

IN THE SWEET SPOT

Around a conference table in a small 27th floor office at 575 Market St., the partners at SSL — mostly women in their 40s — explain the business and cultural benefits they see in their firm: The sense of ownership, the lack of required office face time and the growing client list of well-known public companies. “You have control over the work you do, whom you do it for, and your hours,” said Fedor, one of the Ellman Burke transplants.

“We’re all in the prime of our careers,” said Griffith, who also joined from Ellman Burke.

“We have the contacts to develop great business opportunities, and the energy and drive to get the best results for our clients. It feels like we’re in that sweet spot.”

Part of their success owes to relatively low billing rates, which have become more of a draw for cost-conscious clients. Partners charge between $300 and $450 an hour. The firm has been attracting new clients — such as California State University, which works with Griffith — and new types of work from existing clients. In addition to the firm’s work for Apple and its retail leasing, JPMorgan Chase is now sending them land entitlement and approval matters, for example.

Partners at the firm bill 1,700 to 1,800 hours a year on average, and often work from home. “Everybody has the capability to work remotely and we don’t babysit that at all,” Lakey said. “And I think that clients like that we’re uber-available.”

The economic downturn also seems to have made SSL more attractive to lateral candidates from bigger firms. “It used to be that big firms were the safe place to be,” said Shekou, who joined SSL from Heller Ehrman in 2002. “When I was leaving Heller a lot of people told me I would be wrecking my career by going to some small, no-name firm.”

Shekou says she’s OK with the fact that she’s not likely to work on a huge corporate merger or an enormous portfolio deal. She joined because she liked the energy of the firm’s young women who were controlling their own destiny. And she hopes the vibe doesn’t change. “We’ve been approached to become a bigger firm’s real estate department,” she said, “but it has never appealed to us because it’s so nice to keep our little group the way it is.”

STEADY GROWTH

The group is less little than it was just two years ago. After Ellman Burke closed, Leslie Browne and Michael Brody first moved to Buchalter Nemer, but changed their minds and came to SSL during the last year. Environmental lawyer Zachary Walton left Paul Hastings in early 2010 to help open the S.F. office of Downey Brand. One year later, he joined SSL. “Larger firms claim to be nimble and responsive to the business needs of their clients, but they are not,” Walton said. “At SSL, we don’t have a bureaucracy that needs to approve your relationships with your clients, giving you the freedom to enter into arrangements that make the most sense for you and your clients.” And he says he isn’t a slave to the billable hour. “I work with two associates and they’re busy, but you don’t have to keep four full-time associates at 2,000 hours each busy,” Walton said.

He also enjoys the absence of management looking over his shoulder, evaluating him. “What you make is based off the work you do. I don’t have an executive committee or a chief administrative officer with a spreadsheet that shows how many hours you billed, and here’s how you ranked against xyz,” said Walton, who estimates he’s on track to bill about 1,700 hours this year.

There are downsides to working at a small firm like SSL, too. One of the biggest limitations is the pay, said Shekou. Though partners make at least $100,000 a year, Shekou says they don’t make anywhere close to what first-year associates make at the most prestigious firms. “You have to be willing to have a trade-off. You don’t see those huge salary draws, but at the same time, you’re not expected to work those kinds of hours,” Shekou said. “I’m at peace with that.”

Another challenge typically faced by small firms is the perception that its lawyers aren’t the same caliber as big-firm attorneys, Shekou said. That’s unfortunate, she said, because most of SSL’s partners have Big Law experience, and SSL is bigger than most big-firm real estate departments. “But still, we’re not a MoFo or an Orrick, and those are tremendously well-established, venerable firms that people respect and know,” Shekou said.

Still, over the past year and a half, SSL has added about 14 lawyers, including a few contract attorneys, Lakey said. “Every time we say we’re done growing and we just want to sit down and do our job, somebody totally amazing crosses our path. You don’t say no to really great lawyers who are going to be great team members.”

Lakey said there’s no desire among her partners to diversify beyond real estate, at least not anytime soon. “Now is the time to sit down and do our jobs really well,” she said. “We’re not intending to become another MoFo.”

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Article source: http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202500521405&WomenOwned_Real_Estate_Boutique_Grows_and_Thrives

It’s not like we didn’t already know the banks were opposed to forgiving principal on troubled loans, even though they claim they are doing a little of that now. But today CNBC’s Melissa Francis got an earful from JPMorgan Chase’s [ JPM 45.53  -1.03 (-2.21%) ] Charlie Scharf, CEO of Retail Financial Services.

“We’ve got to be very careful that we don’t create an environment where we encourage people not to pay, and that’s the danger you have when you get into broad based principal forgiveness,” said Scharf.

This is all in reaction to the big push on principal reduction by state attorneys general, meeting in Washington DC this week. While the head of the 50-state investigation into so-called “Robo-signing” foreclosure paperwork issues, Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, did not put forth a fine or penalty fund in his first settlement proposal, the expectation is that banks will be subject to such a fine that would be used for banks to write down mortgage principal.

Already, Senate republicans are blasting any payment.

Sen. Richard Shelby, the top republican on the Senate Banking Committee, at a hearing today put the number to be “extracted” from banks at $30 billion.

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