Incidentally, when the market crashed again twenty years later, in 2008, my phone rang off the hook with people eager to join me on a grave-dancing buying binge. For the next few years, I had to repeatedly explain that this was a whole different recession. I would not be raising a fund because there was no wave of grave-dancing opportunities in commercial real estate. With low to nonexistent interest rates, there was no cost to lenders to carry assets on their books. Now the real estate lending industry’s mantra was “Extend and pretend.” A rolling loan carries no loss. In other words,
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