Bank of America Merrill Lynch is looking to build on AEGON USA Realty Advisors commercial real estate lending expertise to source new lending opportunities for its securitization program.
“AEGON has a very successful and established commercial real estate lending platform,” said Mike Mazzei, global head of CMBS at BofA Merrill. “As the CMBS market continues to recover, this relationship will allow us to increase our securitization capacity and strengthen our CMBS origination capabilities.”
In their 2011 CMBS outlook report, the analysts said that over the past several months, several firms have announced that they will begin lending for securitization.
This bodes well for the recovery in the CMBS space since a lack of financing was considered a major obstacle for stabilizing CMBS. However, BofA Merrill analysts said they expect lending volumes will continue to rise.
"So far, new CMBS lending has targeted a very narrow portion of the market; stabilized assets in generally better locations," analysts said in the report. "As competition for lending picks up, it will be interesting to see how far lenders move into the next tier of weaker markets and collateral. We would expect the property type mix to expand to include more hotels and to slightly bigger multi-borrower deals. "
