Fund News: Stonecrest Strategic Realty Fund – Q2 2019

Since the Fed last decided to raise interest rates, economic growth has slowed and inflation has remained the same, according to Danielle Hale, the Chief Economist at Realtor.com. “Although the labor market remains strong, with healthy job growth and the unemployment rate near long-term lows, the Fed’s concerns about our economic outlook and the long lag time between lowering rates and seeing effects in the real economy were key drivers of the decision,” Hale said.

Now that the Fed has lowered interest rates, the mortgage market is heating up. However, the majority of that increase is due to refinancing current mortgages and not new purchases. The real estate market continues to be flat across the country, with industry experts seeing moderate price increases and even falling prices in some parts of the country.

Stonecrest’s Strategic Realty Fund is busy selling the remaining assets in its portfolio. We have recently taken back a handful of assets that had been in foreclosure for some time, and are now prepping them for sale by the end of the year. For those loans that are currently in foreclosure, but will not be finished by the end of the year, we are receiving bids and plan to have them sold too.

We originally had planned to start returning capital to investors at the end of 2019’s third quarter but, due to the fact that we are sitting on excess cash, we’ve decided to start returning capital with this current quarter distribution.