Atlanta partner addresses congressional oversight panel

Financial Markets Regulatory Wire
January 27, 2010

Atlanta partner and head of the firm’s Office & Industrial Real Estate practice group Mark Elliott was quoted extensively in an online January 27 Financial Markets Regulatory Wire transcript of the committee hearing held at Georgia Tech by the Congressional Oversight Panel to Oversee the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

Chairwoman of the Congressional oversight panel, Elizabeth Warren, was in Atlanta January 27 to hold a hearing among several real estate, business and governmental players on the role and impact of TARP in addressing the state of commercial real estate lending.

Elliot stated before the committee, “I have never seen more distress in the market here than I have in the last year in my 30 years of practice. …We dropped by 95 percent, and that distress is remarkable and it’s having catastrophic effects on the service providers in the industry. And I think there are two reasons for this. It relates from problems on the supply side and problems on the demand side.”

“I think the commercial office market, if you look at the life of an office building, it’s almost like an aircraft carrier. You can’t brake it on a second’s notice and you can’t accelerate it on a second’s notice,” he added.