An empirical study of subordination levels in commercial mortgage backed securities

The CMBS market has been in existence since the mid 1980s; however, it was during the mid 1990s that the market began to grow. A combination of favorable interest rate environment, entry of new players in the market and the amount of demand for commercial real estate assets, led to a record US CMBS issuance in 2004, with the 2005 outlook being even better. However, the subordination or credit enhancement level of these securities has been on a downward trend since 1995. The thesis attempts to analyze the risk factors such as loan to value ratio, debt service coverage ratio, floating versus fixed rate, large and conduit deal types, as well as diversification factors (property type and geographic location), and their impact on subordination levels. Finally, market forces such as spreads on CMBS are also analyzed for their influence on subordination levels. For the analysis, data were collected on 430 commercial mortgage backed securities issued from 1995 through mid 2005. The information was obtained from Trepp, which tracks all the commercial mortgage backed securities issued in the market. The trend in subordination levels of each of the tranches or bond classes was analyzed over the period of study and a quantitative regression analysis was performed to analyze the influence of the above mentioned factors on the subordination levels.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Padhi, Romina

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Brian Anthony Ciochetti.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/33194

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/33194