In 1986, Congress changed the tax laws of the United States eliminating the tax shelters for passive losses on investment properties. This led directly to collapse of the many real estate syndications which had built their business model around these tax shelters, and in turn led to the collapse of the savings and loan industry in this country which had been making huge profits by lending to these syndicates at highly inflated valuations.
In the early stages of this crisis, many of the S&L’s tried to work out their problem loans, often by foreclosing on the properties and placing them into receivership. After taking title, they would attempt to resell them to other investors on very favorable terms.
Hast & Company became involved at that time with helping with these workouts for a number of local and national lenders including the notorious Silverado Banking in Denver, as well as Columbia Savings and Loan in Denver, and TCF Bank in Minneapolis. During this period, we managed many properties all over the Denver area for the lenders including a number of apartment buildings, office buildings, retail centers, the Heritage Square theme retail and amusement park in Golden, mixed use buildings in Downtown Boulder, the hangers at the Erie Air Park and a large motel at 120th and I-25. In many of these cases, Thomas Hast acted as the court-appointed Receiver for the properties prior to assuming management directly for the lender. In a couple of cases, the foreclosed upon borrowers actually retained Hast & Company to manage their property after they got it out of receivership since they had been impressed by our approach and our integrity.
After many of these lenders were themselves closed down and their assets taken over by the federal government, Hast & Company continued to manage the assets for the agencies which had taken them over including the RTC, the FDIC and the FSLIC. We established excellent relationships with these agencies who continued to give us additional properties to manage until their tenure in this capacity ended.
Throughout this period, Hast & Company developed extensive expertise in this specialized field. Tom Hast actually taught many of his lender and agency clients how to properly handle these issues, and taught a couple of public classes on Receivership including one with Oliver Frascona in Boulder.
In the current economic moment, lenders are once again in a position where they may be taking back properties and needing to place them into receivership. Hast & Company is interested both in providing skilled management of real estate owned by lenders, and in providing receivership services where needed.
Please give Tom Hast a call to discuss this further if you are interested.
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