By Tom Maloney at Bloomberg
April 3, 2020
* Many publicly traded U.S. REITs have lost most of their value.
* Starwood Capital and JPMorgan are among those in hunt for bargains.
"The market for mortgage-backed securities was in free fall, with fear running rampant and banks seizing collateral.
So Tom Barrack, the chairman of real estate investment trust Colony Capital Inc., published an 1,800-word plea for the Federal Reserve to buy bonds backed by homes, cars and other assets and for banks to halt margin calls.
That was last Saturday. In the week since, three top investors in the sector have engaged restructuring advisers, two others sold $7 billion of debt at a discount and publicly traded mortgage REITs in the U.S. lost more than $12 billion of market value, bringing total declines this year to at least $50 billion.
The carnage shows no signs of abating. Prominent asset managers including Blackstone Group Inc., TPG and Apollo Global Management Inc. have been sucked into the vortex wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, with their associated mortgage REITs losing more than two-thirds of their value on average so far in 2020."
After $50 Billion of Losses, No One Comes to Save the Mortgage Market
