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Article: Realpoint Adds Rating Competition; New credit rating agency plans to focus on rating commercial mortgage-backed securities.(Structured Finance)
- Article from:
- Investment Dealers' Digest
- Article date:
- October 30, 2009
- Author:
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Byline: Poonkulali Thangavelu
The financial crisis has put leading credit rating agencies under greater scrutiny and opened them for waves of criticism, spurring some newcomers to try and get their foot in the door.
One of the relative newcomers is Horsham, Penn.-based Realpoint, a credit rating agency that specializes in rating bonds backed by commercial real estate mortgage loans: commercial mortgage-backed securities, or CMBS. This is a market that was started up in the 1990s and grew to be an important source of fee income for many Wall Street firms. It also was a key source of financing for a wide range of commercial property transactions. However, ...