Anyone know which insurance companies have gotten back into the lending game? I know in the past the major lenders were Prudential, MetLife, Principal Financial, Lincoln Financial, and Nationwide. I was reading that Northwestern Mutual is doing some big deals in Atlanta. Apparently the MBA tracks this stuff but I'm not a member so I don't have access to their numbers. Anyone have any observations first hand or any statistics they've seen?
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Virtually every major life company is lending, and most have pre-recession level allocations. Other active companies you haven't listed include Aegon (Transamerica), Oneamerica, Guardian, Thrivent, Symmetra, Aviva (now Athene), American Equity, Sentinel (old Vermont life?), quadrant (don't recall which life company they lend for), ING, AIG, Teachers life, Cornerstone (Mass Mutual) and New York Life among others.
Thanks for the list here. What's weird is that some of these insurance companies aren't always as "public" about their real estate lending as I would have assumed. Many of these organizations you can't just go onto the website and go to their CRE loan products. Do these companies lend under different names (subsidiaries, for example)? Or do they simply do all or most of their lending "privately" (relational lending, referrals)?
A ton of life companies use brokerage firms as correspondent lenders. E.g. Life Company A will hire Regional Mortgage Banking Firm B to originate and underwrite loans in a market according to a specific set of criteria.
A lot of the real estate arms of life company's have embarrassingly bad websites or online presence. Nationwides website looks like a geocities website from back in the day last time I checked it. As mentioned above though, when you have a deep network of correspondents across the country you don't always need an online presence as much as some other business models.
$15 billion for pru sounds a little on the high end, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised. They bought a lot of business by offering stupid low spreads. As is the case with the MBA convention though, rumors spread like wildfires and get more and more exxagerated along the way.
Life companies are lending like crazy, I'd say 450M of our 600M of borrowing last year was with life co's. I was at the MBA last week and the word was Pru put out $15 Billion in mortgages in 2013.
A list of Life co's that we borrowed from last year: American national, AIG, Pru, Principal, Thrivent, Great West, State Farm, Allianz.
Thats just our company and just closed mortgages.
Cool. What kind of deals are you doing with these guys? I had always thought Thrivent did like church loans or something.
Across the board, Industrial, Multi-fam, Office.
We did a couple small (6-15M) industrial mortgages with Thrivent.
Not sure what you mean by 'getting back into the market'. Lifecos were super active in the first half of 2013. They were only out of the market in the second half because they filled their allocations for the year. My lifeco buddies are all super busy with fresh allocations. Spreads are coming in as a result.
Agree with most everything said. We did approx. $200m with about 17 different life co. last year. They have always been active, but you just dont hear about most of their deals because, from my experience at least, they are usually smaller, stabilized, and boring (except for the larger ones such as Prudential, which do the headliner deals you read about in the paper). It is amazing how many life companies there are putting out dollars that you will never know exist.
^agreed. Especially the small shops. I work for a larger one so we get some of the sexier deals (certainly do a lot of vanilla also though) but the majority of the pack doesn't market themselves as much as the conduits and banks do and don't show up in headlines.
I understood that insurance companies, like CMBS, pulled back substantially after 2008. Obviously I don't know the insurance lending market well, hence why I'm asking the questions. No reason to get haughty about it.
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