For any opportunistic buyer wanting to get into a new market, nothing could be more attractive than a nice clean asset on which exhaustive analysis has been performed and transparency of information is second to none. If everyone has done their job properly that is exactly what a securitized pool of assets should be – and it’s the reason why investors that have spent a lot of time and effort analysing the bonds that they buy need to watch their backs.
German real estate has attracted more than its fair share of opportunistic buyers of late. So it was perhaps inevitable that collateral backing German CMBS transactions (which took off in such spectacular fashion last year – see chart) would attract increasing attention. When the barely one-year-old securitization of ThyssenKrupp’s residential property holdings paid down in full at the end of December 2006, it was a clear indication...
