Shirish Godbole - Morgan Stanley Shirish Godbole runs the real estate securitised products unit at Morgan Stanley. He has been at the firm since 1994 and in London for five years, very much involved with the seminal ELoC commercial loan conduit. As well as structuring and distributing debt solutions, he has been an equity investor, holding the post of chief financial officer with Morgan Stanley Real Estate Fund (MSREF) between 2001 and 2003. Scott Goedken - LNR Partners Scott Goedken is investme

Like much of the suite of ABS offerings, the CMBS story takes in low absolute rates, upheaval in traditional bank funding markets, financial engineering themes imported from the US and the herd mentality of the hunt for yield. The first and most striking facet of this year's CMBS season has been the unprecedented growth of the sector, shattering consensus predictions. While still off the pace of US volumes, Europe has seen 75% more transactions this year, and looks on track to meet the magic US$

IFR: We are going to start by looking at growth levels and the sustainability of the tremendous market growth that we have seen in the past year. Let us start with Rodney, who has more of an overview of what is going on in terms of net volumes than most of us. Rodney Pelletier (Fitch Ratings): The volumes have been tremendous this year. They have confounded everybody's expectations. I think there was a CSFB conference at the beginning of the year that anticipated we would have about US$29bn equi