Thursday, November 11, 2010

When Special Servicer's Attack

At the bottom of the WSJ's article, Street Aims to Reboot CMBS, there was an interesting piece of news: CWCapital is denying Trimont any of the $19mm in fees related to the Extended Stay workout. Trimont was serving as the Special for about a year until investors voted to replace them with CWCapital. The WSJ article implies that CWCapital thinks that Special Servicing Fees are performance based with the following excerpt pulled from the court filings: "during the nearly one year that Trimont was the special servicer, it had no success working out the loan or resolving the bankruptcy case."

The article also talked about the Innskeeper loan dispute between LNR and Midland. I excerpted below so you can skip over the beginning of the article, which is wholly uninteresting, but CrabsOfSteel has reminded us all that it's sometimes worth reading threw the entire article for the good bits. h/t CrabsOfSteel.


That type of gamesmanship is highlighted in two recent lawsuits related to the bankruptcies of Innkeepers and Extended Stay. In the Innkeepers case, LNR Partners Inc. alleges in a lawsuit filed Oct. 27 in New York state Supreme Court that another investor reneged on an agreement to name LNR the special servicer overseeing Innkeepers' $825 million CMBS loan.

LNR alleges that it had a pact with CRES Investment, a division of Presidio Holdings II LLC, stipulating that CRES would hire LNR as special servicer if CRES's slice of the mortgage was deemed the controlling stake. As a side bet, LNR bought slices of the mortgage on its own to better its chances of getting the designation.

However, LNR claims in its lawsuit that CRES, once it was named controlling stakeholder, didn't hire LNR, instead keeping Midland Loan Services as special servicer. "CRES' failure to comply with its contractual obligations is depriving LNR of its bargained-for right to control workout and resolution of the Innkeepers loan," the lawsuit reads.

CRES representatives didn't return calls seeking comment. LNR declined to comment.

A similar dispute emerged in the Extended Stay bankruptcy. Trimont Real Estate Advisors Inc. alleges in a lawsuit filed Sept. 21 in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., that rival special servicer CWCapital Asset Management LLC owes it a portion of a $19 million restructuring fee. CWCapital received the fee as special servicer of Extended Stay's $4.1 billion securitized mortgage.

However, Trimont said it is entitled to some of the fee because it was the special servicer in the case for roughly a year.

Prior to a bankruptcy auction that resulted in a sale of Extended Stay and its 680 hotels, Trimont was abruptly replaced as special servicer with CWCapital by investors Bank of America Corp., UBS Securities and Cerberus Capital Management LP.

CWCapital has asked a judge to dismiss the case, noting in its court filing that "during the nearly one year that Trimont was the special servicer, it had no success working out the loan or resolving the bankruptcy case."

3 comments:

Dark Space said...

BTW, the case number is 1:2010cv01600, filed 9/21/2010, DC District Court, Judge John Bates.

You may recognize the Judge - he is the chief of the FISA panel, was the guy who went against the current president on the Al Qaeda detainees who were mere supporters of the cause, went against Plame when she attempted to retaliate against Cheney's illegal disclosure of her status as a CIA agent, and the list goes on. He's going places ;).

crabsofsteel said...

What is the FISA panel? Sounds like the Bates Motel (from Hitchcock's Psycho)

Dark Space said...

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is used to add an air of legitimacy to illegal government acts generally following illegally obtained phone tabs and email transcripts via a secretive kangaroo court warrant creation process governed by FISA. ;-)