Two layers of circular debt
Monkies,
I am a first year real estate analyst at a large development firm in Miami, Florida.
My modeling skills are from my perspective pretty good, I've learnt a ton from the senior guys at my office and I make models as a side gig for other real estate investors and developers.
I create models with circular debt all the time. But only with one loan. Ie 20% equity 80% debt.
I tried to create a model with 20% equity 60% senior debt and 20% mezz but the model will not calculate properly if I have two layers of circular debt in a development model.
I've asked the guys at the office but they are also unable to get past this.
Does anyone have insights on how to model multiple debts in a development model ?
I can share my models via DM.
Thanks,
How'd you start the side gig? Curious as I've also though about doing the same thing,.
We'd probably have to see your model to give you an answer.
Mostly going to networking events handing out business cards to lenders and guys who are syndicating deals. I pitch the value that by paying me a few hundred bucks they will have a model that will make them look professional and make it easier to raise money, making them thousands.
i have modeled many many deals with mezz and we always hardcode the senior loan amount and the equity amount.
however, i do think i saw someone take m model and set up the senior and the equity to 'calculate' at X% of the capital stack, and i think it worked ok. the mezz in that case though was simply the remaining gap. so maybe if you allowed one piece of the stack (such as the mezz) to calculate as 'total - X - Y = mezz.' try that.
Can you explain how the debt is 'circular'? I do not see how you can have circular debt in models with only one debtor or with a senior and mezz debt...
Mezz w/ no current pay and a conventional senior construction loan?
okay - that is senior and subordinate debt, not circular debt.
Circular debt is an instance when parties become both a creditor and debtor to each other. For example if A Loans money to B, B Loans money to C, and C Loans money to A. In your example its simply Senior loans to Sponsor, Mezz loans to Sponsor, Sponsor is just a debtor..
Circular meaning that the loan size is represented by say 70% of LTC, including interest expense.
As interest racks up the project becomes more expense which means we need more loan to cover it.
so don't you fund an interest reserve from the beginning?
I am just having trouble understanding why this is being called "circular' debt - I have never came across this term in a real estate transaction.
Deleted, I was misinterpreting his question, my bad.
You don't need to use goal seek. That's a pretty inefficient way of modeling a dev loan
Not if it's a circular reference and you need to reassess the financing based on iterative new assumptions..... If that's not what he is referring to then it's a moot point.
EDIT: I'm referring to the fees, I think we are talking about different things.
You can enable iterative calculations which solves the problem of circular references in excel. Also, I typically have an equity balance remaining line in my development models. In this case having a mezz balance remaing would be helpful as well.
If you have a line that has your equity balance something like =if(and(project cost>0,equity balance=0),min(project cost,remaining mezz balance),0) should work just fine for your mezz draw funding.
This might f up your workbook if you are running tables in it though - it's happened to me way too many times.
Then I would do the exact same thing with the mezz and senior debt
Assuming you mean capitalizing an interest reserve into the mezz loan, I don't think this is possible without hard-coding one of the variables. Both your senior loan size and your mezz loan size are going depend on your equity draw schedule which can't properly be run without knowing the size of each. Excel can't just calc through it.
This is pretty atypical though. Usually you just see the mezz take out a certain portion of the equity and get paid a current yield that the senior debt is blind to, with no circularity required on the mezz piece.
I do mean capitalizing the interest into project cost.
My problem was with interest that would capitalize on the mezz loan when there is no FCF to pay for interest expense. So even if I limit the amount of mezz that can be drawn to 10M, when capitalizing interest it the balance will accrue interest to say 12M.
I can see how a goal seek could work. It would find the max amount of loan you can draw so that the peak mezz loan balance would not exceed say 10M.
Lets say we
To answer your question, I've run as many as 3 layers of debt through development deals (senior, mezz, pref) and the TL;DR version of my answer is - it works if you make it circular, but bloats the model, which can take a while to balance given how circular it is.
What I have started doing to avoid this is running a reserve account for each tier of debt, the reserve amount for which I hard code into the budget. So the deal starts with the total reserve account balance day one, and then it chips away at it until NOI/CF can cover the payments. I run a separate reserve for each tier. If there is cash left in the reserve, I set it to release at a certain date, DSCR/DY or disposition.
In the budget, I have a side calc that shows me how short or overbudgeted the reserve is based on the cash flow, so I just hardcode it to within a small margin (you can goal seek as well as was mentioned). The end result is that the model is no longer circular, which makes it run a lot faster especially for sensitivity tables.
The downside is that the model is no longer fully dynamic (i.e. I can't just plug in a leverage and rate for each tier and have the model spit out the balanced budget for me). That said, if you know how to use it properly after you set it up, the model works a lot more smoothly. It's obviously extra work to set it up this way, but I think it works better overall.
Are you funding an interest reserve?
In essence yes,
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