Cambridge Realty Capital, a Chicago-based lender which specializes in senior housing and health care properties, processed 19 loan origination requests in January totaling more than $317 million.
The January figures are down slightly for the same month a year ago, when the firm processed 22 loan requests worth $373 million. But Chairman Jeffrey Davis said the small drop is more attributable to the way the company enters applications into its internal processing system than an actual decline in business.
According to Davis, who founded his firm in 1983, lenders close a relatively small percentage of loan applications. But Cambridge regularly tracks this information as an indication of market direction. "The way we currently read the market is that conditions remain less than ideal but borrower interest remains relatively strong," he reported.
He also said that today's tight credit markets have forced the firm to be more selective in the loan applications it considers.
