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Spare an unforeseen rally, it’s looking like the year-end US CMBS issuance tally will fall short of the triple-digit billions number many had predicted, anticipated and/or hoped for. As of today, there was $87bn of CMBS issuance, according to TREPP.

TIAA Henderson Real Estate and its joint venture partner Madison Realty has refinanced The Houndsditch Estate in the City of London with a new £120m debt facility. ING and Santander jointly provided the five-year loan. The finance reflects a loan-to-value of 60% on its £200m value.

Blackstone Mortgage Trust (BXMT) has provided a $210.7m floating-rate loan to Banyan Street Capital and Oaktree Capital Management for the acquisition of a 19-building suburban office building portfolio located across six US states. The loan helps to fund the $237m acquisition as well as additional capital expenditures and leasing costs associated with the properties.

Royal Bank of Scotland is being sued in the High Court for an alleged breach of a loan agreement involving one of the highest profile residential developments to fall victim to the downturn, Real Estate Capital can reveal. John Morris, the developer behind the luxury Charters scheme near Sunningdale, south west London, is suing RBS for reneging on an agreed banking facility to finance the final construction works at the site in September 2008.

Guggenheim Commercial Real Estate Finance has provided a first mortgage loan to Oxford Properties Group for one of five Boston office buildings the Canadian investment firm bought for $2.1bn earlier this year. The $150m fixed-rate permanent financing of the 22-story office tower at 125 Summer Street was “very competitively priced given the strong sponsorship and the fresh equity” going into the property, Riaz Cassum, a senior managing director with the HFF debt team that placed the loan, told Real Estate Capital.

ING has lent TH Real Estate €85m to refinance a designer outlet mall in Italy The five-year loan is secured against the fund manager’s Serravalle Designer Outlet, located just outside of Milan. The asset is Italy’s first and largest designer outlet, comprising over 38,000 sq m. It is owned by the €1.5bn European Outlet Mall Fund.

Morgan Stanley has provided a $140.5m loan to New York-based real estate investment firm Savanna for the refinancing of 31 Penn Plaza in Midtown Manhattan. 31 Penn Plaza 31 Penn Plaza The two-year (with three one-year extension options) floating rate loan carries an initial coupon under 2%, Kelly Gaines, a managing director at Jones Lang LaSalle who led the financing, told Real Estate Capital.

Cerberus has purchased non-performing real estate loan portfolios from Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and National Australia Bank (NAB) totalling £6bn, it was announced today. The £4.8bn par value portfolio acquired from RBS is made up of Irish commercial real estate loans collateralised by 5,000 assets, said a source close to the deal according to Real Estate Capital's sister publication PDI. A small portion of the portfolio is made up of loans to buy-to-let investors and around 25 percent is tied to assets in Northern Ireland with the remainder in the Irish state.

Real Estate Capital has launched its first annual awards to recognise the best deals and firms active in the real estate debt markets during 2014 both in the US and Europe. After looking back over 2014, we made our pick of the firms and the deals that made headlines in what turned out to be the busiest year […]

The Bank of England’s stress testing of the UK banking system has exposed The Co-operative Bank, Lloyds Banking Group and Nationwide’s real estate loan books as being the most volatile in the case of a severe economic downturn. In the hypothetical scenario created by the Bank of England, which included a 30% drop in commercial real estate values, it was expected that the Co-operative Bank – the only bank to fail the broader stress test - would have to write off 19.1% of the value of its loans, Nationwide 16.3% and Lloyds 16.1%.