Animal Spirits Podcast - Talk Your Book: Opportunities in Commercial Real Estate Debt

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

On today's show, we are joined by Richard Byrne, President of Benefit Street Partners to discuss the chaos within the commercial office space sector, the opportunity for commercial real estate debt, what separates one asset manager from another, how real estate lending works, and much more! Find complete show notes on our blogs... Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor Feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.   Check out the latest in financial blogger fashion at The Compound shop: https://www.idontshop.com Past performance is not indicative of future results. The material discussed has been provided for informational purposes only and is not intended as legal or investment advice or a recommendation of any particular security or strategy. The investment strategy and themes discussed herein may be unsuitable for investors depending on their specific investment objectives and financial situation. Information obtained from third-party sources is believed to be reliable though its accuracy is not guaranteed.   Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. The Compound Media, Incorporated, an affiliate of Ritholtz Wealth Management, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's Animal Spirits Talk Your Book is brought to you by Benefit Street Partners. Go to Benefitstreet Partners.com. To learn more about their private debt offerings, CLOs, real estate, special situations, high-yield structure credit. On today's show, we're going to talking mostly about real estate debt. We also talk about private credit. Remember that's Benefitstreet Partners.com to learn more. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben, Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ridholt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ridholt's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Michael, for a couple of years now, it feels like we've been talking about this coming train or whatever you want to call it. Maybe it's more like a slow-moving,

what's the thing on Austin Powers? Steamroller? Yes. There was a lot of Forest Camp movie analogies. That's exactly what it is.

And I guess we're talking specifically that slow motion steamroller crash. Yes. Get out of the way. Get out of the way. By the way, on the show, I was stuttering and stumbling

and bumbling for, and I used the word isolated. My brain, I couldn't retrieve it. I was looking for the word contained. This happens to me too. I was looking for contained. This is harder than it looks.

But anyway, the isolation or the containment, I should say that we were referring to. We're talking about the office real estate train wreck. And he made such a great point. I'm so happy he said this because I have been saying this. But when I say it doesn't matter because I don't know what I'm talking about. You got really excited. When an expert says, I'm like, yes, I was right. We had the crisis in office real estate.

It's not coming. It came. Right. And now is the aftermath in dealing with it. And so we talked to Rich Byrne today from Benefits. Street Partners and yeah, he talked about, via via, via, you know I like the Via Via Via Via, Benefit Street Partners is owned by Franklin Hamilton. Yes. And they're a huge alternative asset management firms focusing mainly on debt. And he talked about, he was really excited about the opportunity. And sometimes you can get the difference between someone who is just pushing an opportunity versus actually like excited about the opportunity. We saw it in his face. Yeah, so you could see it in his face. And he thinks that there's a lot of opportunity there for fresh capital in this space. If you've already were in the space and your legacy, it might be hard to clean up the mess, but he's saying coming in with fresh capital, he's seeing opportunities unlike he's seen in a long time.

Yeah. All right. This is a fun conversation. I hope you enjoy it. Thank you, Rich. And thank you, Franklin and Benefit Street Partners are coming on. Rich, thank you very much for joining us today. Great to be here.

Before we talk about all things, private debt, real estate, all that good stuff, mind giving our audience just a sense of who Benefit Street partners are? Absolutely. Hey, guys, Benefits Street Partners is a $76 billion alternative asset manager. Everything we do is credit. So it's corporate credit in the form of direct lending or liquid credit, you know, in the form of high-eal bonds or broadly syndicated loans slash CLOs, or it's distress lending. Or last flavor for us is real estate lending, which is a really cool relative value right now.

We're owned by Franklin Templeton. They bought us about six years ago. Franklin's a little bigger than us. They're about a trillion six. And we've enjoyed that relationship. So that's the background. Rich, you've got a bunch of pieces that you've written

for Franklin Templeton about commercial real estate and the debt there. And I'm a sucker for a good movie analogy. And I've used this one before. You wrote about Forrest Gump, taking out the shrimp boat and coming back and all the other boats are taken down, right?

I've used that one before. so you're good in my book. Maybe you could just give a... Michael and I have talked about the commercial real estate market. It seems like it's a place people have been talking about for the last 18 to 24 months

as like this coming crisis. Something's going to happen. Commercial real estate is going to take down the market. This is the next thing. Maybe you could give us an update about where things stand in that marketplace because I think the fact that there hasn't been anything, it hasn't really caused any macro waves yet,

is probably surprising to some people. I think you're right. And the only thing I would say, little different than the way you phrase that is, I think the crisis has occurred already. I think the consequences of that crisis are the part maybe that haven't. That's the semantical difference, I would say. What happened in commercial real estate? Well, rates, two things. Rates went up and that affected valuations of properties. Real estate's very highly correlated, very easy to understand cap rates go up when rates go up, hence property values.

go down. I think that's generally true for most asset classes, but it's most easy to understand and highly correlated for real estate. But the thing that I think people don't appreciate as much is if maybe we use a boxing analogy, that's like a left jab. That's a jab that, you know, gets your attention, it stuns you a little bit. It's certainly not life-threatening. The punch that knocks you out is the cross, and that's the office sector. So while everybody's focused on rates, office sector really has nothing to, office sector really has nothing to with rates. Office sector, as you all know, and the rest of the world knows, is, you know, we have more office space now post-COVID than we have people that, you know, need to work in offices. And we've got to, that's got to settle itself out.

We think that's going to take three to five years to resolve. While that's getting resolved, there isn't a good outcome for an office property, at least in this country. Some will be way better than others. And there'll be some, you know, and on the bad side, there'll be zeros. So what hasn't happened yet is the sort of price discovery of what everything is really truly worth. Maybe you need some more time for some of that to play out so you really kind of know. But there's a lot of reasons why that hasn't happened. And the fact that it hasn't all happened at once is actually a good thing.

Because if it all happened at once, then I'm not sure. all the people that own real estate loans or real estate have enough equity capital to get through this. So that's why this is playing out so slowly. And we can talk more about that if you like. Rich, I'm so glad to hear you say that the crisis, I don't want to put words you mouth. I forget exactly what you said, but we had a crisis. Is that what you said? The crisis has already occurred. Okay. Okay. So to that point, and I was saying something similar, listen, I don't know where all the bodies are buried and what might happen in the future. This is what I was saying a year ago or so. My point was, guys, everybody knows these things are in deep do-do.

S.L. Green, which is based in New York, the equity was down 76%. It's not a secret. I'm sure the bonds were at least as bad. It already happened. And in fact, S.L. Green, the equity, at least, is acting really well lately. But it's no secret. This is not going to come out of nowhere. And you're seeing all sorts of headlines in the newspaper.

This San Francisco skyscraper, this New York skyscraper got sold. then okay, yeah, the office sector real estate is in deep trouble. And to your point, that's a post-COVID work-from-home type of environment. That's not a rate story. So we're already digesting that the rabbit is working its way through the python. The equity will be ridden down. The debt will get restructured and pain will be felt. But maybe it's not more of a macroeconomic story.

It seems to at least to date have been relatively isolated or maybe that's a bad phrase. But you know what I mean. So what sort of real estate do you all focus on? Okay. So I think of the world in two ways. There's legacy loans and there's new loans. So when I say legacy loans, so back in 2021, it was about a two-year period post-COVID. It was the end of 20, it was all at 21 and the beginning of 22. It was basically, we'll call it the free money era. Money was cheap or almost free. And there was a lot of construction. There were a lot of loans. There was a lot of, you know, part of. and happy times. All of those loans, even the best properties, the best multifamily, new vintage, Sunbelt, great stuff, is worth less purely because interest rates went up. So if you were lending at a 65, let's say, loan to value, 6570 LTV as a lender in 2021, that loan today, that property is probably worth 20, 25% less just because of rates, not because of any reason else, the property is perfectly

fine, just rates are higher. That loan to value now, if you're a lender, is like 90. Is 90 mean you're losing money? In theory, no, but you don't have a lot of margin for error at 90. So all of the lenders out there, the banks, the public mortgage rates, the private funds, need to work through all of that 2021 vintage origination. And it has to that, you know, that's what has to get through the Python. That has nothing to do with office. But, but, you know, that problem exists all by itself. So getting back to the Forrest Gump analogy, like, where are you seeing value these days? And this is the kind of thing where you think value is going to be there for a long time because it's going to take a while for this to play out? Or, like, where are you finding

opportunities? Yeah. So the Forrest Gump analogy for everybody, funny, just as a side note, I wrote this white paper and we have an editor and this editor said, you should take out the Forrest Gump thing because not everybody has seen the movie. So I just did. I just didn't. a test of like the 10 people near my office. I think we were 10 for 10 that they all saw the movie. So anyway, we'll assume that your viewers have seen the movie. But, you know, Forrest decided to get in the shrimping business and he couldn't catch a shrimp. He was catching like license plates and things until Hurricane Katrina came and he was irresponsibly out at sea. But in a Forrest Gump way, his boat was saved. All the other boats crashed into the

shore and were wiped out. And for a period of time, he was literally the only boat in the Gulf of Mexico, shrimping in this fictional story, and caught all the shrimp, and then he ended up creating bubblegum shrimp and investing in Apple computer and live happily ever after. It feels like that because all of the traditional lenders, all these big boys that when we show up to, you know, give a term sheet for a loan to an attractive property, you know, we're competing against the biggest names on the street plus banks. Banks are unlike corporate debt, you know, direct lending, where banks have largely been disintermediated by this private capital. In real estate lending, the market is still about 50% bank and it's small regional

banks. So they're all on their butts right now. They're not making a single loan. Most of the traditional lenders, the big guys, they're not making a single loan. Why? Because they're hoarding cash. Because if somebody injected them tomorrow with sodium pentothal, that's from old spy movies, that's the truth serum, and said, you know what, let's mark everything what it's worth and we'll wash our hands of it and we'll just go forward. And that'll all be yesterday's news and we'll go make money in the future. Everybody wants to do that trade. Well, you can't. You can't do it because nobody has enough equity now to absorb those losses when they have to buy loans off of their warehouse lines or out of CLOs or get new appraisals.

Nobody has, and certainly the banks don't. So, especially the small regional banks, because they just don't have a big enough business model to bail out of this stuff. Because the average corporate lender, excuse me, commercial real estate has 25% office. That's the problem. So this is why it's going to take a while. So back to your question, what's the opportunity? while all that's going on and all those boats are crashed in the shore and they can't go fishing, fresh capital to deploy into just a regular way market right now, just making regular loans, you're getting your pick of the litter, you're underwriting properties, you're probably excluding office,

you're not even looking at office, but high quality class A multi, you're making loans against them at valuations that are 20, 25% lower than they were in 2021, at like 60 LTVs with great terms, and, you know, you're getting looks at great properties because, you know, you're not getting outbid by anybody. There's nobody else, you know, I wouldn't say nobody, but the amount of competition is a fraction of what it used to be. So the play is new loans.

Fresh money is the opportunity right now in commercial real estate lending. Talk about the vehicles through which the investors can actually. access some of these great new loans. Okay, so that's going to be a little trickier. So, Michael, let me say it this way. You'd be a fool to think that any attractive market opportunity, the markets aren't efficient. Of course, there's going to be new capital to take advantage of it.

But most of the vehicles that investors would see have legacy exposure. That's tricky. So it's owning any bank that makes commercial real estate loans or commercial mortgage rates. we have a publicly traded commercial mortgagery. We have under 5% office exposure. The average exposure of our peers is 25%. They're also trading at 70% of book value. So the market kind of gets it. So there might be some value, you know, if you think one is better than the other or whatever. But to us, the opportunity is in a newly created vehicle. So you'd make loans. You know, anything with new capital to deploy, because I would call that the 2.0 vintage.

You're making loans against, as I said, properties that are marked down 20, 25%. You can skip office as an asset class until it comes back. And you can be super selective because it's so little competition. Is this an interval fund? Is that the structure? A perpetual reet. So how does that work? I'm not familiar with that.

Okay. So a perpetual reet is, think of it as a closed-end fund. that has quarterly redemptions. Okay. So similar. Just like an interval fund. Yeah. Just like an interval fund.

So the way that this works, practically speaking, is you raise a pool of capital, issue shares and then take that money. Do you love, do you, is there some leverage there? There can be. That's, that sort of has to do more with the flavor of, you know, how the manager wants to run the strategy. But with 60% LTVs, which is real 6065, let's say LTVs, which is really like sub 50 LTVs off of 20,

2021 valuations, we think it's perfectly appropriate to put, you know, a turn or two turns at most of leverage on that. So on an unlevered basis, you're generating SOFER plus 3,400. Sofer's 5% plus some upfront fees, some back-end fees. I mean, that's like 9% or higher, unlevered. So I don't sure equity real estate investing has that kind of return potential right now. And this is cash return. So, you know, just in the scheme of value, you know, we look over a giant purview of different investments. I mean, we run all these other strategies. It's not like, you know, we have one strategy and we're just pushing it. Compared to corporate lending, this is just more yield, better, better value, you know, less crowded. Dumb question. Dumb question. So the loans are being

paid back by what? Is this just rent? Yeah. So there, think of in real estate lending. There's, there being like three types of loans. There's construction lending, which we generally don't do, but we'll dabble in. That's riskier, right? Well, yeah, you're doing something ground up. It's a different type of expertise. Then there's once your property is completed, there's sort of like a bridge financing, you know, taking it, you know, from start to stabilized. You know, think of a multifamily. Once you get it all occupied and people paying rent, then it's stabilized. And then the third type of financing is like a permanent financing. Think of that as Freddie or Fannie or a CMBS eligible financing where you're getting like 10 year fixed rate financing where we typically, we'll play in all three. But where our balance sheet is more often than not is in that middle one. These are generally three year floating rate loans. So a sponsor will buy a property or, you know, take out of construction financing. And then they'll look for this finance. to be temporary until the property stabilized and then they'll take it out with a fixed rate

longer term piece. Did that make sense? That yield, especially with leverage, sounds pretty juicy. What's the risk here? Is there default risk from some of these loans? What is the possible downside? Well, from our perspective, in this new vintage, I mean, everybody's thinking about the risk of real estate. They're thinking about stuff that got underwritten in 2021. For this new vintage, I mean, I'm not going to say it's without risk. You obviously need to be careful. There's different asset categories. We favor multifamily.

We can talk about why. But one of the risks in multifamily people talk about is that rent growth has really slowed. It's actually been negative in some of the Sunbelt markets because there's been an influx of new capacity, you know, that's been added to all these markets. Because when money was free, people were just building buildings. So, you know, that's certainly a risk that rent slows, you know, you're not hitting projections. But again, it's- What about prepayment risk? So you're making the loans sort of to stabilize it. And what if the company says, hey, you know what?

We're actually okay. We don't need this money anymore here. It's yours. Yeah, we'll take a small prepayment penalty and then move on and make a new loan. I mean, that's, if that's your worst risk in the world, think of it this way. The three-year loans, we're on a treadmill set at like 10. So, like, if everything goes according to plan, you're just, you have to replace. place a third of your book every year anyway. So if you add a few prepays in there, then it's not

– and remember, they're floating rate. So the only reason that they're prepaying is if credit spreads, tight, not not rates, you know, because they're – and they usually have rate hedges, too. So they kind of take rate out of the equation. So that's another risk, albeit not like the real risk that you're thinking about, but just in terms of the stated income that you could expect today if and when rates go down and they are heading down, you're going to get a low return because the rates are floating. Correct. You're right. That that's that's the I it's not a default oriented risk. It's a it's a lower it's a lower down the total pull risk. But actually I think that that's like a good risk because are 11% loans like really sustainable? Like yeah,

that's great. But it's great until they can't pay it because it's like punitive. Exactly. So there's it's a double edge sword. People were come you know all the legacy books were freaking out because rates were going up and, you know, they were worried about how are they going to, how are these loans going to exit? But at the same time, they're generating record net interest margins. So funny enough, all these mortgage rates that are trading at 70% of book value, they're all overcovering their dividends, you know, because they got this windfall of extra income. So it's a double-edged sword. The lower rates go, the higher the credit quality is, the easier the exit path is going to be for all the loans when they hit maturity. But the less

income you're going to generate, or get greedy, you can generate more income and hope for the best on the back end. For the multifamily, is there also some thinking there that, yes, there was a huge building boom when rates were really low and the pandemic stuff took off, but I assume most of that stuff has kind of been stopped dead in its tracks with rates getting higher. Are we going to see rent growth increased again in the coming years because of this period? Yeah, Ben, you nailed it. It's cheesy, but we're talking about Forrest Gump, you know, that Wayne Gretzky quote of

go where the puck is going. Yeah, rent growth is slowed because of all the, all the, all the properties that have been delivered into the market. There's only another quarter or two before any new construction gets, you know, is finalized. But how many shovels have gone in the ground since second quarter of 2022, like zero? So now, you know, come 2024, 2025, you know, there's not going to be any new capacity delivered unless something starts today, you know, it's probably not in 26 either. So, yeah, you're going to see a lot of that pressure relieved and probably lead to, you know, some pretty healthy rent spikes in the good markets where people want to live.

Richard, I don't know if this is a fair question to ask. It's like asking a barber if you need a haircut. And actually, I was going to say that you've got you and I share the same barber. So just from that alone, you're good in my book. But in terms of investors doing diligence on benefit and Franklin versus some competitors, what sort of question should they ask? I mean, this is, you know, we, I speak for our listeners or are not experts in the real estate loan space.

We don't, you know what I mean? Like, how do we say, okay, I like what they're doing? I don't like what they're doing. Like, what should we even, what are the questions that we should be asking? So this is a good question because, and this applies to commercial real estate lending, to corporate lending, to anything. But I mentioned that there's a lot of the traditional lenders are on the sidelines. it would be crazy to not expect the market for their new capital not to be formed. So when

you think about new capital that's being formed to address this opportunity, there's a different way of asking your question. What should you look for? Well, you want somebody that's done it before. Let's at least start with that because a lot of the new capital is coming from the equity guys. You know, the property reed guys that are like, oh, I, you know, it's not so great to buy properties now. I should be lending. And they, you know, they'll figure it out. Well, they're smart. investors for sure, but, you know, lending is a different discipline entirely, you know, writing loan documents and, you know, we've been doing this for a billion years. So I think it's, you know, expertise, not just in real estate, but in, you know, in lending. There's, of course,

track record. Like, for example, a lot of the commercial mortgage rates that trade at 70% or less percent of book value, you know, they're licking their wounds. So, I mean, you know, their credibility and going out and raising new capital would be like, well, what did you do with the capital they used to run. Where is that trading? So I think you look at track record. I think you look at length of time in the business. I think you look at what you've done. Is it the same as what the opportunity is? Because in some cases, Michael, that new capital is being formed not in the form of traditional first mortgage loans like we're talking about, but in Mez or in like gap capital, which does look more like equity. So it depends on what flavor you're

looking to invest, you might, you might have a different expertise. But I think you're trying to match the track record and expertise and experience of a manager with what is the opportunity. I think it's the basic ABCs of, you know, doing your due diligence on investing. And if you're buying into a legacy book, I only have one answer for you there. And that's a you better due diligence on the assets that they own or that they've lent to. So we're talking mainly about real estate debt here. Your firm manages all these different strategies. Do you talk with clients about being more opportunistic in this kind of space? Do you think it makes sense to have just a target allocation to stick with it? How do you think about that? Because it seems

like you're pretty excited about this opportunity. When this sort of thing happens, are you pounding the table for people, hey, this is a better opportunity than that? Or how do you think about that? Yeah. So you have to, you know, as a president of a big lending firm and asset management firm, you kind of think of this as like a mother would think of choosing amongst her children. And so, you know, don't really have any favorite favorites. But, you know, from time to time, certain strategies have better relative value. They just do. And this is that time for commercial real estate lending as compared to commercial real estate equity investing, but for sure.

But in our world, you know, we do, as I mentioned up front, corporate lending. You don't have an office sector in corporate lending. So people think it's way better. Of course it is. You don't have 25% of your market that got kicked in the business. behind, but you also don't have the dislocation that occurred with that that creates the opportunity. So I think there's apples and oranges. I want to talk about private credit, but before we do, just before we move off the real estate stuff, how does this work in terms

of, okay, we've got a real estate company, they need to raise money, they need a loan, they hire an investment banker, there's an auction. I mean, just am I making that up? How does it work? Yeah, no, it's, that's more, that would more describe a corporate loan opportunity, For real estate, a building is built. It was either built by the person who currently owns it or maybe the person that built it sold it to somebody else. Either way, the construct, you know, they're going to want to pay off that construction loan

because that was expensive money. It's now completed. They don't need that loan anymore. They're going to replace it, as I mentioned, with some type of, if the property was instantly stabilized, then maybe they'll go straight to a permanent financing. But more often than not, the owners of that building, or the person that just bought the building from the prior owner,

is going to seek some type of financing to put in place for a few years while they stabilize the property, while they optimize its performance. So typically that'll be a three-year floating rate loan on a property at today, like something like a 60-65 LTV. So if you buy a multifamily property in Dallas, you know, it's $100 million, somebody like us will probably lend you $60 to $65 million against that. that SOFA plus X, and you know, you'll have some extension options if you need a little more time before you stabilize it. If your business plan runs according to plan at the end of that

three years or maybe even a little sooner, if you do a good job, you'll be ready to take out our loan and put in a Freddie Fannie back loan or some type of cheaper, termed out fixed rate that. I think I did a bad job asking the question. What I was really looking for is how to Sorry. No, it's my fault. How do they find you? And also, how do you win the deal? Oh, okay. Well, now it's easier to win deals than it was before because there's not a lot of people competing against us. But either brokers, you know, there's a ton of properties around this country. We've been lending to, you know, good developers, good sponsors for a long, long time. A lot of its repeat business, you know, they've had a good experience with you. A lot of it lately is because anybody else who's been providing them capital like banks isn't isn't answering them. phone, but either through direct relationships from, you know, people you know, people you've done business with before, or in some cases through brokers. Got it.

Okay. All right. Can we talk private credit? Absolutely. So this is the hot topic of the day of the year. Banks are stepping away from these loans as probably they should. Not a great asset liability match on that front. Talk about what you're seeing in the space.

I guess what I would ask, maybe as a kickoff. instead of asking a general question, is my inbox is every day, it's private credit, private credit from a different sponsor. Is this leading to more competition and therefore maybe some more sloppy underwriting? So there is absolutely more competition in private credit, but it's even worse than that, because we'll talk about the supply and the demand. So on the demand side, yes, there's capital being raised to invest in private credit. Everybody wants it. It's still the flavor of the month, and it has been on a crescendoing basis since the end of the global financial crisis, for good reason. There's just better relative value here in private credit than

there is in the broadly syndicated market. You're getting more covenants. You're getting more yield. It's just better. And what's the difference? I'm sorry, for our audience. What's the difference between the syndication versus the loans? So it generally size. So, you know, a loan of a certain size will typically, you know, let's say a billion in high and up, will be syndicated through a bank. So J.P. Morgan or somebody will arrange that loan. They'll, you know, syndicate it through a group of lenders. CLOs are typically the buyers of that. They call them bank loans, but they're mostly, you know, like non-bank lenders. But they'll syndicate it, which will mean a competitive process and the rate on that loan will ultimately be sort of the market clearing rate in the

broadly syndicated market, you're typically not getting a very aggressive covenant package because you know, there's, it's, you know, they're originating and they're selling it. Exactly. Whereas the private debt market or direct lending market, you're doing the same thing that that JP Morgan or somebody like that is doing, but you're the sole lender or there's a group of lenders that's one or two or three other people. So far this sounds good. Yeah. And the reason that you can do that is because they're smaller. They're generally off the bank's radar screen. What happened in 2008 is a little bit of a misperception. People think banks got out of the lending business because of bulk of rule and because of capital charges and all that, which is true.

But the main thing banks did is they just did math and they just said, look, it takes just as many people to underwrite a $10 billion loan as it takes to underwrite $100 million loan. we're just going to do only bigger loans. So that kind of left this whole, let's call it, billion and lower loan size to these private lenders. And that's what we call direct lending. All those big banks getting so much bigger that, so that was one of the reasons that they left this, too, just didn't scale for them?

Yeah, because they, the economy is a scale of underwriting small loans just didn't make sense for them. You know, banks, banks, you may remember after 08, they started downsizing and, you know, they kind of, they're cherry picking bigger deals and just leaving to firms like, you know, the private lenders the opportunity of going into the middle market. That's what happened. It just got bifurcated. Michael mentioned the fact that we're getting hit with all these emails on a daily basis from these kind of private credit funds. What kind of red flags can financial advisors look for? Because it's the same thing with private equity or any of the alternative where financial advisors

might not be very well versed in this area, but they see the yields and they go, oh my gosh, this sounds like it's too good to be true. So what are the red flags advisors should look for? So what's happening now, so this is back to the supply demand, so is that a lot of capital is being formed around this opportunity. In institutional world as well as retail world, there's a lot of these we mentioned before, perpetual BDCs, interval funds that are taking advantage of this opportunity.

So a lot of capital, that's generally not great, but equally not great is lack of supply. M&A has really come down to a trickle. We all thought it would kind of like start picking up again, you know, because rates go up and then you need a period of time where people adjust to the new rate, buyers meet sellers, and then the M&A volume starts to pick up again. It hasn't picked up. And the reason it hasn't picked up, even though it's so logical that it would because

all the financial sponsors that want to raise new capital need to get monetizations on their old investments and they need to put to work the new capital that you would think buyers would and sellers would meet it just maybe the prices aren't where they need to be so you know we're still in this digestion period so my point is that there's lots of demand lots of capital being raised and very limited amount of deals that's not the formula for good terms i'll just say it that way when there's more buyers than sellers the credit spreads tend to tighten covenants tend to loosen and, you know, it just creates a little bit more of a food fight for finding deals. It's funny. It might be less a reflection of the current market as like in terms

of like, oh, the economy is good and maybe more reflection of, which I guess is the same thing, but risk appetite and also just there's just a lot of money there. People are fighting for deals. There's a lot of money there. Yeah. On the positive side, I would say this. If you want exposure to corporate lending. Those private debt, the same exact technical factors are occurring in the broadly syndicated lending market. Same light M&A, same amount of new capital being formed. CLO volume has been the record, I think this is the highest year since the global financial in like however many years that is. In 16 years, I think it may be the highest, you know, the biggest year for capital formation around CLOs. So the same thing is going on in the broadly

syndicated market. So private credit or direct lending is still a better value than any other form of corporate lending in our opinion. It's just that, you know, the kind of the tide is lowering for everybody. That makes sense because corporate spreads are pretty tight too, right? Very. That's the point. Yeah. So it survived till 25. I feel like a lot of industries are saying that. Does that still hold true in your ears or your eyes? It depends on which of the asset classes we're talking about. I think for real estate, I would probably say that survive until 26 or 27, maybe 28, because I think that that story is going to take that many years to play out. In corporate world, it depends on your rate forecast. But yeah, if you think rates are going down,

then things should be easier to do. M&A calendar will pick up. You know, the world will look better. So I think it's survive until blank. You fill in the blank. Like that. All right, Rich, we spoke about a lot of things. Is there anything that you want to make sure that our audience hears from you? Yeah. So, you know, as we survey the world, maybe some of this is repeat, but I think you try to look for best relative value across different asset classes. As I said up top, I think commercial real estate lending, you know, to us is the, there's

like, say it this way, the Forrest Gump analogy, there's a category four or five hurricane going on in commercial real estate right now. the assessment of the damage is going to take multiple years to figure out. So that scares the hell out of most people. But, you know, from our perspective, the more the chaos, the more the disaster, the better the opportunity for fresh capital coming in. So that's how we thought of that. How says loans are like a box of chocolates?

You can't eat just one. Well, that's not exactly where I was going. Oh, you never know what you're going to get. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Rich, for listeners that want to learn more about Benefit Street Partners and Franklin Templeton, where do we direct them? Well, for sure, you can go on our website, Franklin Templeton or Benefitstreet Partners.com, you know, we can talk about it. Or we can, in the notes to your podcast, perhaps, we can put some contact information. Absolutely. Oh, last thing. Is this, are these structures primarily driven through intermediaries like advisors or can end investors

is get them on their own? It depends. So if you're an institutional investor, we'll typically do lockup type funds. In the institutional market, they generally know where to find us. We're pretty well-known name. And the retail market, for the first time, now that we're part of Franklin, and they have such a big presence with wholesalers and advisors, you know, you'll see that through an RIA. You'll see that through a wholesaler, you know, a wirehouse, you know, as our funds get on different platforms. You'll see them that way. And then lastly, we have a publicly traded, as I mentioned before, commercial mortgage rate. You could just FBRT, New York Stock Exchange. You can just go direct. All right. Rich, this was excellent. Really appreciate you

coming on today. My pleasure. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Okay. Thanks to Rich Byrne. Again, remember check out BenefitstreetPartners.com to one more. Email us, Animal Spirits Pod. Nope. No, Animal Spirits at the compound news.com. Check. First time I've messed it up in a while. See you next. time.