July 29, 2008

Virtú Investments Founder Hosts Commercial Real Estate Podcast

San Francisco CA — Virtú Investments, LLC, co-founder Michael Green was recently featured on nationally recognized talk show, the Capital Synergies Podcast for commecial real estate investors.

In the podcast titled "July Review for Commercial Real Estate Investors" listeners are presented with a candid interview between Michael Green and Dan Fasulo, Director of Market Research for Real Capital Analytics. Their topics include the market slowdown, the end of non-recourse financing as we know it, timely discussion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac capitalization, and more.

Offered as an educational service for investors, the podcast explores critical issues in today's changing capital markets. The dialogue between these two experts gives insights not commonly found in mainstream news media, and is a worthwhile listen for any one involved in the commercial real estate industry. Here's an excerpt:

MIKE: "It’s so interesting to be in a cycle that isn’t driven by the supply-demand fundamentals. Usually, we see our real estate corrections occurring on the operational side when supply exceeds demand. In this case we’re seeing it on the capital side, and largely as it relates to the original subprime meltdown which has now trickled into our business and constrained credit to such degree that our values are dropping, not because of supply-demand fundamentals but because of the availability of credit. I remember suffering a little bit of this in the late 90’s with the Russian crisis, but that only lasted six months. Do you have any idea? Are you guys looking out and seeing it improve any time in the near future?"

DAN: "Well, you know, I think we really need to get the CMBS market jumpstarted again, and we’re all pretty confident that it’s going to come back. It’s just the question of when and in what format. I think we’re going to start to see some new issues trickling in the fall, and I’m hoping we get back to a more normalized situation in the middle of next year. But I think when it does come back, it’s going to look a lot more like it did when the industry was very conservative, underwriting LTV, and this will actually make sense to the lay person." (Click to listen to the full interview.)

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Michael Green and Scott McWhorter formed Virtú Investments in 1997. Since then, the company has acquired over forty five properties throughout the country. The company's current portfolio is valued at approximately $450 million and Virtú has approximately $140 million of private equity under management. Virtú performs its own property management and has primary offices in San Francisco and Carlsbad, CA, and satellite offices in Seattle, WA and Scottsdale, AZ.

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