Home values grew during 2017 at their fastest pace in four years and the same supply and demand dynamics behind that increase remain in place for 2018.

Consumers’ desire to shop online is creating huge demand for distribution centers and forcing property owners to think creatively about redeveloping vacant retail space. Meanwhile, hundreds of billions of dollars will be spent rebuilding areas hard hit by hurricanes and wildfires.

Commercial real estate collateralized loan obligations appeal to investors now because they issue short-term, floating-rate notes; several nonbanks are using them to finance bridge lending.

Was the president’s recent tweet about enforcement measures against Wells Fargo an articulation of the administration’s approach for holding banks and executives accountable? Or is a tweet just a tweet?

The trend of putting ever-smaller pieces of the same commercial mortgages into multiple transactions means investors can end up with more exposure to a single property than they realize.

This feature, which has already been incorporated into some newer transactions, gives the sponsor more flexibility to manage its overall portfolio; Moody's investors Service thinks it is credit neutral.

Electric vehicles are starting to show up in pools of collateral for auto leases, but it's harder to predict what they will be worth when they are repossessed or come off lease, says Moody's Investors Service.

Some were sold at discounted prices, while others were shut down by their acquirers or quietly ceased doing business.

Many raised large amounts of capital to put to work in the equity, or riskiest slices of their deals, allowing them to resume issuing new deals just as new loan issuance was taking off.

Both in dollar and transaction volume, credit card use is growing at a faster pace than debit use. Much of the growth is coming from affluent consumers who value rewards like 2% cash back on purchases.

A second bank, M&G Prudential, had joined the deal agent, ING Capital, boosting capacity to $80 million from $40 million.

Exposure to PetSmart's now triple-C rated loan will strain the distressed debt limits of 24 collateralized loan obligations, while two other deals face potential interest-diversion test failures.