MISMO update: Two more years!

I was re-elected to the Commercial Board of Governors of MISMO for another two-year term, so I will remain active in MISMO at least through 2013. MISMO, which stands for the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organizations (www.mismo.org), is a standard-making body run by MERS and owned by the MBA.

I have been active in MISMO because I believe commercial real estate deals should have a standard XML data set that is comprehensive enough to understand and value the deal.

When I got involved with MISMO two years ago, the biggest gap in the existing standards was well-defined XML standards for the key property financial data, the rent rolls and operating statements. I chaired the effort to create those standards, and we successfully completed them in early 2010.

Since then, we have spent our time working on letters to the SEC as part of the Reg AB reform effort, but we have been holding off on creating new standards until we get the SEC response. After the SEC makes its ruling, we will quickly create an XML standard that matches the regulatory reporting requirement.

Deal Standard for 2011

My reasoning for continuing with MISMO for the next two years is to help push the idea of a comprehensive “Deal” XML data set.

This new standard will contain enough data for a commercial real estate professional to understand and value a deal.

While I am hopeful that the SEC reporting requirements for securitized loans will be comprehensive and, therefore, be the same as the deal standard, it is possible that the SEC requirement will come up short and be a subset of the to-be-created MISMO Deal Standard.

Either way, MISMO will aim to provide XML schemas for both needs.

The next few weeks/months should be active. There is a major CREFC conference next week in Washington DC, and the MBA CREF conference is in early February in San Diego. Also, the SEC should be releasing its rules any day now. I’ll report back on all these happenings.

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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