CMBS stands for commercial mortgage backed securities. It's essentially a financing vehicle to provide loans, or financing to commercial real estate property owners. This is not the only option available in the entire universe, CMBS accounts for 15 to 20% of the lending universe. It competes with insurance companies, banks and other financial institutions to provide loans to the commercial real estate industry. What happens in the market is that a bank, let's suppose entity A will provide, let's say, 10 loans to property owners across America, different property types, different geographic locations. That bank, if it has provided, let's say 100 million dollars worth of loans, will pull all of those loans together, that means the monthly mortgage payment that the borrowers are making to lenders. They'll pull all of that together and issue bonds which will be sold to investors.

Since COVID, whatever happened before March 2020, was a completely different story. The market was performing in a completely different way. And now after let's say late March, the situation has drastically changed. What is really happening is that there isn't as aggressive lending out there in the commercial real estate space. Lenders are extremely cautious. They want to really analyze the property. Let's suppose I am lending to office space in Houston, Texas. Before this crisis when oil prices were not that low, and the market was doing okay, they would look at the tenant roster, they would see who the tenants are and, most of the time there were no issues. Now in Texas, energy companies have been battered and the credit quality of the tenant has become an issue, you do not know if the current tenant of the property will continue its lease. You do not know if they will continue to make payments and that is really making lenders take a step back and understand who should they lend money to, and all sorts of analysis they need to do. Because of that, we have not really seen a lot of lending for hotels, of course, because hotels have suffered a lot and are still suffering a lot. So, there is a lot of hesitation in lending. And even when there is lending, there's a lot of analysis that's going on, and this also has increased the cost of borrowing for borrowers.

The June delinquency report that we published had a delinquency rate of 10.32%. This means that more than $50 billion worth of loans are behind on their payment, and there is distress in the sector. If we compare it to an earlier crisis, in the last financial crisis, the number was 10.34%. So we are fairly close to the peak that we have ever seen.

10.34%, was in July 2012, the crisis started in 2007/2008, so it took some time for us to reach that number. Fast forward to April 2020, that number was 2.29%. And now in June of 2020, it's at about 10%. So it was a very fast increase.

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