Apartment Soft-Story Retrofitting

[Hayden Harper]

Hi all,

I'm currently a commercial mortgage broker in Southern California.  We've recently been noticing a problem from a financing standpoint, lenders are requiring hold-backs / denying loan because of retrofitting reasons.  LA county flagged 13,500 apartments that need to be retrofitted for seismic strengthening.  I know San Francisco in-acted this ordinance back in 2013 so I want to see if any of you have dealt with this problem before and how it has affected the multi-family market? Attached is a LA Times article discussing the ordinance in further detail.