Real Estate Spotlight: Banks unload commercial real estate

Since the beginning of the Great Recession, banks have been saddled with a glut of commercial real estate that they took back when property owners could no longer make payments or could not get their loans refinanced. For a while, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) put little pressure on banks to deal with their commercial real estate portfolio, and banks sat on the commercial real estate assets they were accumulating. However, recently sales of bank-owned commercial real estate have increased significantly as federal regulators are now putting pressure on banks to unload their commercial real estate dead weight, commercial real estate brokers say. Read more in the Real Estate Spotlight column in the latest edition of the BizTimes Milwaukee magazine.