AGC says that “bank lending” improves (somewhat)

The paragraph that follows was pulled from a much longer article that appeared, on May 6, 2011, on AGC’s web-site, under construction economics….

Most domestic banks reported no change in their standards for approving CRE [commercial real estate] loans; however, a few large banks and foreign banks reportedly eased such standards somewhat,” the Federal Reserve reported on Monday in summarizing its latest quarterly survey of senior loan officers at 55 U.S. banks and 22 U.S. branches and agencies of foreign banks. “About 35% of domestic banks reported having seen increased demand for CRE loans—the strongest reading since the mid-1990s. The banks that indicated an increase in demand were almost all large domestic banks. Other domestic and foreign banks reported little change in demand for CRE loans on net.” The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, “J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. has about $5 billion in [CRE] loans in the pipeline, about $1 billion of which is new construction. That is a threefold increase from its pipeline 12 to 18 months ago, bank officials say, a turnaround from recent years when the bank all but stopped originating commercial real-estate loans.” The article also cites Wells Fargo & Co. and Deutsche Bank AG as having increased CRE loans, but “banks shedding such assets include [Bank of America Corp.], Huntington Bancshares Inc., KeyCorp and SunTrust Banks Inc.”