Monday Market Minute | Jul 3, 2023

Romspen and the private mortgage sector navigate peak-rate stress testing

What Moved

The Canadian private mortgage lending sector entered its most demanding environment in a decade as rates approached peak levels. Romspen Mortgage Investment Fund, one of the sector's largest players, continued to manage through a portfolio that reflected the broader stress points: construction loans facing cost overruns, commercial borrowers with compressed margins, and a handful of impaired positions requiring workout attention. Across the MIC sector, impairment provisions ticked higher, though remained manageable for well-diversified portfolios.

Why It Matters

The stress test was, in many ways, validating. Well-underwritten portfolios with conservative LTVs, diversified geographic exposure, and disciplined borrower selection were demonstrating resilience. The problems were concentrated in funds with outsized construction exposure, single-geography concentration, or related-party lending — precisely the governance failures that Bridging Finance had exemplified. For investors performing due diligence on private credit allocations, the current environment provided a real-time separation between quality operators and those that had relied on rising tides.

Signal to Watch

Whether the BoC would hike again at the July 12 meeting, which would push borrower debt service costs even higher and accelerate the separation between resilient and vulnerable portfolios.

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