Insurance lenders

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)?

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.

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.