SEC Probes Rental Home Values in Private-Equity Bond Deals
U.S. securities regulators are investigating whether bonds backed by single-family rental homes and sold by Wall Street’s biggest residential landlords used overvalued property assessments.
Radian Group Inc.’s Green River Capital unit is among companies that received a request for information from the Securities and Exchange Commission in March about broker price opinions, or BPOs, Radian said in a regulatory filing late Friday. Green River provides BPOs that are used to value real estate in bonds backed by properties.
The agency has been looking at whether BPOs were wrongly inflated, and similar letters were sent to other companies, potentially serving as a starting point for an industrywide probe, said a person with knowledge of the matter. The SEC is scrutinizing how BPO providers compete for business and whether their customers shop for providers willing to put the highest value on their properties, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing private matters.
Radian, the second-biggest U.S. mortgage insurer, said in its filing that the SEC was seeking information from “market participants.” The company said it routinely gets such requests from regulators, and the disclosure didn’t indicate that Green River was the focus of the agency’s inquiry. An SEC spokeswoman declined to comment.
Radian’s Processes
“We believe that our company processes are both robust and comprehensive, and we stand behind our work,” Radian said in an emailed statement to Bloomberg. “We have solid quality control processes in place, including for our property valuation services, and those processes have been reviewed and validated by both internal and external sources.”
Broker price opinions are a cheaper and less-stringent way than appraisals to estimate what a property is worth. Valuations are a sensitive subject in the housing industry because regulators said inflated appraisals contributed to the U.S. housing bubble.
Green River is one of several firms that provide BPOs to private-equity companies and other investors who bought up hundreds of thousands of properties after the bubble burst. Many of those buyers focused on distressed homes whose owners were evicted during the Great Recession.
The biggest private-equity landlords, led by Blackstone Group LP’s Invitation Homes, have sold more than $15 billion in bonds since 2013 backed by some 120,000 rental homes, according to data from Morningstar Credit Ratings, and many of those deals were valued using BPOs. One recent bond deal tied to Invitation Homes was backed by guarantees from U.S. taxpayers. The broker opinions were provided by Green River. Claire Parker, an Invitation Homes spokeswoman, declined to comment.
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blackstone is backed by JP morgan chase. Folks do not buy a property in florida. the values are back up to just before the crash of 2008 and whether it was overvalued to sell securities or what the values are being declared now, key word here is OVERVALUED and its insane. There are no good deals in florida unless your income has rose as fast as the property values and seriously doubt that has happened with the average person. I repeat homes in florida are overvalued and what goes up must come down.
I hate to keep on drawing analogy o my own twelve-year-old ridiculous debilitating life changing devastating battle with fraud but what about the SEC investigating Nationstar UsBamkmand the whole conspiriing debt buyer profiteers .b12 years later forced to call the default Wilshire Drove.me in purpose with deception in 2006 callimg me a foreclosure appearing line level for the very first time.? Using a pllc so low as.they.go they lost their tax status and don’t foreclose where they live. Then on any action send in the Legal Giants Goliathn and Lord Locke a team of 5 to lie about things that just defy reason .
I forget. It’s Texas . no one cares.