Wall Street 1-2-1's Dodi Handy Featured on “TheStockRadio”

LAKE MARY, FL–(Marketwire -02/23/12)- Wall Street 1-2-1 today announced that an interview with Dodi Handy, the financial event company’s managing principal, is now airing on TheStockRadio, found at http://thestockradio.com .

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LAKE MARY, FL–(Marketwire -02/23/12)- Wall Street 1-2-1 today announced that an interview with Dodi Handy, the financial event company’s managing principal, is now airing on TheStockRadio, found at http://thestockradio.com.

During the interview, Handy shares insight into Wall Street 1-2-1′s novel “speed dating” approach to transforming how Wall Street professionals discover new and exciting investment opportunities; and provides details about the upcoming Wall Street 1-2-1 Spring 2012 event taking place on May 8-11, 2012.

Wall Street 1-2-1 Spring 2012 will welcome nearly 500 attendees to the Rosen Shingle Creek Golf and Spa Resort in Orlando, Florida, where senior executives from up to 125 high growth public and pre-IPO companies will meet one-to-one with 100 of the nation’s leading professional investment firms. The central focus of the event is a series of four “Meet the Money” sessions conducted over a fast-paced, two-day period (Thursday, May 10 and Friday, May 11). During these highly energized meeting sessions, corporate managers will have the opportunity to give brief, high impact presentations to up to 25 invited investors and investment firms per session. Each five-minute presentation will be strictly timed and limited to ten or fewer PowerPoint slides in flipchart form. By virtue of this clever presentation format, investors can rapidly assess which of the presenting companies are of interest to them and merit further due diligence and/or a follow-up meeting. For more information on Wall Street 1-2-1 Spring 2012, go to http://www.wallstreet121.com/events/all-events.

The StockRadio.com is a small-cap research and investment commentary provider. TheStockRadio.com strives to provide a balanced view of many promising small-cap companies that would otherwise fall under the radar of the typical Wall Street investor. Moreover, TheStockRadio.com provides investors with an excellent first step in their research and due diligence by providing daily trading ideas, and consolidating the public information available on them. For more information on TheStockRadio, please visit http://thestockradio.com.

TheStockRadio.com Disclosure
TheStockRadio.com is not a registered investment advisor and nothing contained in any materials should be construed as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities. TheStockRadio.com is a Web site wholly owned by Allan James Group. TheStockRadio.com nor its affiliates have a beneficial interest in the mentioned company; nor have they received compensation of any kind for any of the companies listed in this communication. However, TheStockRadio.com is serving as a media partner to Wall Street 1-2-1, LLC for Wall Street 1-2-1 Spring 2012. Please read our report and visit our Web site, TheStockRadio.com, for complete risks and disclosures. To contact TheStockRadio, please send an email to info@TheStockRadio.com.

About Wall Street 1-2-1, LLC
Wall Street 1-2-1 is committed to earning industry recognition as the nation’s premier host of innovative, highly experiential financial industry events that effectively address precious time constraints and value imperatives of corporate executives and investment professionals. This vision is supported and guided by three fundamental principles: organizational excellence, value-focused initiative and unimpeachable core values. For more information, please visit www.wallstreet121.com. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Wall Street Crowds Into Trader Joe’s for Bond Deals: Mortgages

February 23, 2012, 7:42 AM EST By Sarah Mulholland Feb. 22 (Bloomberg) — Wall Street is scouring the U.S. for grocery stores as bankers are pushed out of lending to trophy office properties

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February 23, 2012, 7:42 AM EST

By Sarah Mulholland

Feb. 22 (Bloomberg) — Wall Street is scouring the U.S. for grocery stores as bankers are pushed out of lending to trophy office properties.

Morgan Stanley is selling about $1 billion of commercial mortgage-backed securities with five of the 10 largest loans tied to retail buildings, including specialty supermarket Trader Joe’s in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a Kings Food Market in Millburn, New Jersey. About half of the largest loans bundled into CMBS in the past six months are linked to retail, up from 27 percent in December 2007 and as low as 12 percent in June of that year, according to data compiled by JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Wall Street has turned to financing a broad swath of retail properties, from shopping centers to suburban strip malls, as insurance companies and government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac offer better lending terms on the best office buildings and apartments. Investors are wagering the economic recovery is strong enough to justify buying the securities even as analysts and debtholders are concerned that the deals include too many stores amid restrained consumer spending.

“In this market you eat what you kill,” according to Alan Todd, head of CMBS research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in New York. “If those are the assets you find you can originate, than those are the properties you find in the deal.”

About $16 billion of mortgages on retail properties packaged and sold as bonds come due in 2012. Landlords who need to borrow more than insurance companies are prepared to lend will turn to the commercial mortgage-bond market, Todd said.

‘Need More Diversification’

More than 20 percent of investors in a JPMorgan survey cited heavy retail concentration as their primary concern with new CMBS deals, the bank said in a report this month. The proportion of loans linked to retail buildings rose to 45 percent for bonds sold in 2011, from 25 percent for 2007, according to the New York-based lender.

“We need more diversification in these deals,” said Lisa Pendergast, a commercial-mortgage debt strategist at Jefferies Group Inc. “If there is some kind of big hit to the consumer, you don’t want to have too much retail. It’s not a good investment decision to put your eggs in one basket.”

Commercial-mortgage bond lenders, who profit on the difference between what borrowers pay and the cash brought in by selling the securities, charge higher rates than insurers and other financial institutions that hold loans on their books.

Difficulty Competing

Wall Street has had difficulty competing against insurers and government-supported housing agencies since CMBS sales revived in 2010, according to Darrell Wheeler, a bond strategist for Austin, Texas-based Amherst Securities Group LP. Issuance of the securities, which peaked at $232 billion in 2007, plummeted to $11.5 billion in 2010. Wall Street arranged $28 billion of the debt last year.

Government-supported entities such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have also increased lending by selling $33.9 billion of bonds tied to apartment buildings last year, from $21.6 billion in 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, reducing another pool of potential borrowers. Multifamily buildings fell to 5.5 percent of CMBS in 2011 from 18.6 percent five years earlier, JPMorgan data show.

Lending to retail property owners has risks. The average vacancy rate for neighborhood and community shopping centers was 11 percent through the fourth quarter of 2011, holding at the highest rate in more than 20 years, according to research firm Reis Inc.

Sears Holdings Corp., the second-largest tenant in the $600 billion CMBS market, said in December that it was closing as many as 120 stores after sales fell.

Late Payments

Late payments on retail mortgages packaged and sold as bonds rose 32 basis points, to a record 7.21 percent last month, according to Fitch Ratings. That compares with a rate of 8.32 percent for all property types. A basis point is 0.01 percentage point.

“Moody’s is concerned about retail concentration in CMBS 2.0 deals,” said Tad Philipp, an analyst at Moody’s Investors Service, referring to deals sold after the boom ended.

At the same time, “the recession did an excellent job of separating retail winners from losers, and three-year track records for sales and occupancy are more valuable than ever,” he said.

Increased lender demand means better terms for mall owners such as Simon Property Group Inc., the largest in the U.S., and General Growth Properties Inc.

The largest loan in the Morgan Stanley pool being sold is a $130 million mortgage to The Shoppes at Buckland Hills, a Manchester, Connecticut-based mall owned by GGP, according to a regulatory filing.

Banks Calling

The fourth-biggest is a $65.8 million mortgage on Capital City Mall in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, owned by Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust. The real estate investment firm used the loan to refinance maturing debt, the filing shows. Mary Claire Delaney, a spokeswoman for Morgan Stanley, declined to comment.

Andrew Ioannou, senior vice president, capital markets and treasurer of the REIT, said since the commercial mortgage market’s revival banks are now calling them instead “of the other way around.” One advantage is Wall Street allows borrowers to take on more debt in exchange for higher interest payments, he said.

“Without a doubt the CMBS market right now is more aggressive than it’s been in a long time,” he said.

Relative yields on top-ranked commercial-mortgage bonds have narrowed 47 basis points this year to 214 basis points, according to a Barclays Plc index. The spread is the narrowest since July.

‘Sexiest Looking’

Investors got accustomed to seeing Manhattan trophy properties in 2007 when Wall Street was offering low rates and high leverage, said Pendergast of Jefferies. Buyers should be looking for stable properties in reasonable markets, she said.

“It may not be the sexiest looking deal, but that doesn’t make it a bad thing,” the Stamford, Connecticut-based strategist said of lending to less prominent buildings.

The retail industry has spawned an array of property types over the past 15 years, from neighborhood strip malls to outdoor lifestyle centers, according to Ryan Severino, an economist at Reis, and some have withstood the economic downturn better than others.

“We are very picky with what we will do,” said Paul Vanderslice, co-head of the U.S. CMBS group at Citigroup Inc. in New York. “Shopping centers anchored by grocery stores are very good, and are a much better bet than a third-tier regional mall.”

Economic Outlook

The retail loans getting placed into recent deals have relatively low leverage, meaning the owners are not as deeply in debt, said Harris Trifon, a commercial-mortgage debt analyst at Deutsche Bank AG in New York.

“Barring some catastrophic change in the economic outlook, most of the properties should perform as expected,” Trifon said. “It’s not going to be a situation where all of a sudden, all of the retail loans start going bad at the same time.”

Still, shopping malls in slow-growth markets, with significant exposure to a single tenant or with unproven track records do show up frequently in CMBS 2.0, according to Amherst’s Wheeler.

Even as the U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 8.3 percent in January, the lowest since February 2009, from 10 percent in October 2009, consumers remain defensive about spending, said Severino of Reis. Household purchases climbed 2.2 percent in 2011 after an increase of 2 percent in 2010, the weakest two- year performance of any expansion since the end of World War II.

“We are definitely over-retailed as a country,” said Bank of America’s Todd. “If the third mall in a one-mall town is the largest loan in the deal, then obviously the retail concentration works against you.”

–With assistance from Christine Harvey in New York and Robert Willis in Washington. Editors: Pierre Paulden, Larry Edelman

To contact the reporter on this story: Sarah Mulholland in New York at smulholland3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Rob Urban at robprag@bloomberg.net