Commercial real estate veterans still wary of the market, BankUnited CEO says


In a recent CNBC appearance, Jon Kanas, CEO of BankUnited argued that commercial real estate will continue to plague community and regional banks into 2011, resulting in a large number of bank failures next year. Though “there’s clearly a lot more tolerance for risk [now] than there was a few months ago,” he said, those who have begun investing in commercial real estate again are speculators and Wall Street investors, rather than industry veterans. “What’s interesting about the people who are jumping into commercial real estate these days — either by way of mortgages or institutions that are loaded with these kinds of problems — is that everyone is there except the commercial real estate guys,” Kanas noted. “People are believing what they want to believe…but the guys who have spent their lives in this business aren’t there yet.”

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