Typical banks, all they want is their riskless profits. They don't lend to seasoned investors who know how to buy 20% below market. Instead they lend on the fly by night pay cheques to buy multi million OTP grossly valued apartments or newly developed homes where there is bugger all equity in the purchase. Retail banking heavily subsidises the losses suffered by the appalling lending decisions their corporate and institutional counterparts make. With each corporate default, there goes another couple of hundred million written off the books. Why would you bother? They're lucky to make a quarter of the margin you would get by lending to a Somersoftian even at full doc rates. I know which loan I'd rather write if I was a lender - to investors who know how to buy and develop IPs instead of to the fancy powerpoint presentations with ridiculous cash flow assumptions to RMs and credit officers. I suppose RMs don't get paid enough lending $1-2M to retail projects than they would working on a $500M lending facility to say a Babcock or Allco project or General Motors. Oops, there goes $500M of shareholders cash down the toilet with the RM getting rewarded with a redundancy package through a massive golden handshake.
Banks - can't live with them, can't live without em!