Commercial

A plan to save commercial real estate

(CNN MONEY) - Economists have long been predicting commercial real estate could be the next day of reckoning for the financial markets, with a wave of defaults looming as billions of dollars in troubled loans come due in the coming months.

But a little-noticed bill introduced in January could help bring a new source of desperately-needed liquidity to the sector: foreign investment.

Introduced by Joseph Crowley, a six-term Democratic congressman representing parts of New York City’s Queens and Bronx boroughs, the Real Estate Revitalization Act of 2010 would eliminate certain taxes that were part of the Foreign Investment Real Estate Property Tax of 1980, or FIRPTA — which requires foreign investors to pay as much as a 55% tax on capital gains from the sale of U.S. real estate or shares in real estate investment trusts and real estate operating companies.

Repealing the tax, Crowley and the bill’s supporters say, would get rid of a major impediment to foreign investment in the sector — and could open the floodgates to new liquidity at a time when commercial real estate loan defaults pose a serious risk to the nation’s fragile economic recovery.

The FIRPTA tax, the bill’s supporters say, penalizes foreign investors who want to put cash into U.S. real estate because those same investors don’t face such taxes when they buy into other U.S. assets, like Treasury securities, corporate equities or corporate bonds.

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