We had the kick-off call for the rent roll and operating statement standards making committee yesterday, and 17 firms called in representing CMBS issuers, banks, insurance companies, rating agencies, servicers and data providers. I was encouraged by the attendance number and the productive conversation. We made good progress through rent rolls and got started on operating statements.

The rent roll schema discussion was pretty straightforward. We decided we needed to add a few elements (payment frequency and number/type units), but everyone generally agreed the current schema is workable.

The discussion around operating statements was a bit more difficult. It centered on two issues:

1. How to identify the op statement in the header. Op statements can cover many periods (annual, quarterly, monthly), and they have different types (actual, normalized, adjusted). After 30 minutes of discussion, we pretty much agreed we would identify operating statements with three data elements: Start Date, End Date and Type, but everyone wanted to think about it some more.

2. The number of operating income/expense categories we would support. Basically two lists of NOI categories have been compiled. The first is the summary reporting categories used by the CMSA IRP: about 30 core categories in three different templates — commercial, multi family and hotels. The second is a much more detailed group that represents just about every chart of account value there is. There was general agreement we would map the detailed list of NOI categories up to the “roll up” reporting categories that represent the 30 or so CMSA core reporting categories. The servicers seem to do that now, so no reason to change.

The next call is in a few weeks. We hope to finish the discussion and get a draft schema out ASAP. Thanks to all who called in. Please call in next time if you’re interested.

CMSA Conference kicks off Monday

I am headed to New York next week for the Annual CMSA Conference. We sponsor this conference every year, and we will be doing our normal booth and suite (including our annual cocktail reception). Three of us will be pushing our asset management, origination, bond and data tools.

The Big Session will be the IRP 6 committee meeting, 1:15 to 2:15 p.m. Monday. Jim Cooke, who sits on the C-MISMO Board of Governors with me, is participating on the panel, so we know the topic of XML will be discussed and supported. The CMSA did a great job promoting this meeting, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out. I’ll report in from New York.

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Jim Flaherty is CEO of CMBS.com and the creator of the Backshop loan origination system. He is a trained credit professional with experience installing enterprise underwriting systems for commercial real estate lenders, rating agencies and investors.

www.cmbs.com

www.backshop.com