Commercial Mortgage Delinquency, Foreclosure and Reinstatement

Whenever a property appraisal is performed, the lender calculates and records the debtcoverageratio. The one closest in time to the first observation is selected. 7The average debtcoverageratio was 149%. Never-delinquent loans have a higher debt-coverage ratio thandelinquent loans, and reinstated loans are higher than foreclosed loans.Non-recourse loans are relatively rare in Canada. In fact, 87.6% of the loans in thedatabase had either a personal or a corporate guarantee, or both. The indicator variablemeasuring the guarantee is 0 if the loan is non-recourse and 1 if there is any type of guarantee.Unfortunately, the breakdown to the type of guarantee (personal or corporate or both) and thesubjective evaluation of the quality of the guarantee were not consistent in the lender’s recordsand were therefore not usable in the empirical work.Of the 1637 loans in the database, the guarantee data is only available for 898. In orderto avoid discarding the observations with missing data, a dummy variable indicating whether theguarantee variable was missing was created, and the guarantee variable itself was coded 0 formissing data. In the estimations, the coefficient on the dummy variable will capture the averageincremental value for the loans with missing guarantee data. This value is not reported in theestimation tables. The coefficient on the guarantee represents the marginal effect for the nonmissingcases. This technique is exactly analogous to Archer et al. (2002).The lender diversifies their portfolio across property type and geographic region. Thelargest category of property types is retail, which includes shopping centers, strip malls,restaurants, auto dealerships, stand-alone fast food restaurants and other retail properties. Besidesretail, the major categories are offices, apartments and industrial/warehouse. The remaining othercategory includes vacant land, hotels, motels, airport properties, medical buildings, governmentproperties, nursing homes and schools.7 I am unaware of a Canadian rental index across property types, so I am unable to adjust the debt-coverageratio for the passage of time. The average number of days between the date of the debt coverage ratio usedand the first observation is 337.8