Longer-form thinking on where the market goes.
17 white papers
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Disclaimer: This is an excerpt from Trepp's "Freezing the Rent: How Expenses Impact the Multifamily Investor" paper. Click here to access it . Rent control debates usually focus on tenants, affordability, and housing policy. Investors and lenders, however, tend to focus somewhere else entirely: net operating income…
Second-quarter earnings calls from banks with meaningful multifamily concentrations showed significant divergence in performance and pipelines. The ten banks differed not only from one another but, with two exceptions, also from recent super-regional commentary, where lenders reported stronger pipelines and…
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The Fed is expected to hold rates this Wednesday, July 28th, 2026, but a hike is a real possibility after surging energy prices revived inflation concerns. Meetings can move markets even when the rate does not change. In June, the Fed held and still jolted rate expectations, producing the largest hawkish surprise…
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Community banks in the $2 billion to $6 billion asset range are assumed to carry safer retail commercial real estate (CRE) exposure than their larger peers. The reasoning: community banks more frequently lend to ‘needs-based’ retail, which is a fundamentally different credit from a super-regional mall. We tested…
Commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) delinquency rates suggest Whole Foods is a riskier retail tenant than Walmart. That's exactly the wrong conclusion. Among the top 200 CMBS tenants, Whole Foods Market carries a 22.4% delinquency rate, followed by Safeway at 9.7% and Costco at 5.5%. By comparison, Walmart…
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Every commercial real estate loan starts with a single number: how much a lender is willing to lend against a collateral property. That initial number is determined through “loan sizing.” At the proposal stage, the originator receives and organizes materials from the borrower or their broker that report the…
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The most competitive corner of the retail CRE lending market right now is not the safest slice of the stack. It is the middle. Over the past year, lenders have gotten meaningfully more aggressive on the 60-65% loan-to-value (LTV) band, tightening the marginal price of that incremental debt while pricing on the…
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Consumers say they feel worse than they did in 2008 and are spending like nothing is wrong. The Michigan sentiment index set a record low in May, the same month retail sales reached the top of their trailing year. The question for anyone in commercial real estate (CRE) reading the consumer is which signal to…
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After two years of tighter credit conditions, the bank commercial real estate (CRE) lending story has shifted from whether banks are pulling back to where balance sheets are growing again. Aggregate loan growth has picked up in parts of the CRE book, and recent lending commentary has pointed to a cautious return of…
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Florida’s unemployment rate rose to 4.8% in May, up from 3.7% a year earlier, one of the largest increases of any state and the highest Florida reading in nearly five years. The rate has continued to climb and now sits above the national unemployment rate of 4.3%.
Depending on your perspective, you may call it back-leverage or you may call it ‘loan-on-loan’ financing. Either way, loan-on-loan financing enables a fund to achieve higher leveraged returns while being an attractive risk-adjusted, capital-efficient way for a bank to lend. This primer is designed to explain how…
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Disclaimer: This is an excerpt from Trepp's "The Midwest Multifamily Investment Mirage" paper. Click here to access it . The Sunbelt has become the market everyone loves to hate. Oversupply, concessions, elevated vacancies, and slowing r ent growth have pushed many investors toward a new narrative: that the Midwest…
Trepp's analysis of CRE lending spreads from early 2025 through June 2026 finds that while spreads are compressing uniformly across property types at the 50-59% LTV level, relative premiums between property types are shifting—specifically, retail loan premiums have compressed relative to industrial loans, and office premiums have widened over retail. The report notes that these quoted spread movements may indicate capital rotation toward retail or competitive yield exhaustion in multifamily and industrial, though the data reflects only stabilized, low-leverage deals and may not signal broader credit repricing across higher-leverage or transitional assets.
Ten-year conduit loans have declined dramatically from 95.6% of conduit loan count in 2019 to just 12.3% in 2026, while five-year loans have become the dominant format in the CMBS market. Median 10-year conduit spreads tightened from 301 basis points in 2023 to 201 basis points in 2026, suggesting the remaining market reflects more selective underwriting rather than pricing that is prohibitively wide.
Five-year conduit loans have become the dominant structure in CMBS issuance, rising from 3.1% of loan count in 2019 to 91.0% by 2026, though this shift reflects market preference for shorter duration rather than aggressive pricing. Spreads have remained disciplined post-2023, stabilizing in the high-200s basis points across property types, with multifamily pricing most tightly (263 basis points in 2026) and lodging most widely (319 basis points in 2026), indicating that lenders continue to differentiate sharply by collateral quality and sector risk despite the structural shift toward five-year terms.
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On March 19, 2026, the Federal Reserve, FDIC, and OCC jointly proposed Basel III capital rules that expand access to credit risk transfer (CRT) structures for U.S. banks, eliminating the prior requirement for case-by-case Federal Reserve approval and allowing standardized regulatory treatment instead. The document examines how synthetic risk transfer and credit-linked notes work for commercial real estate portfolios, illustrating with a stylized example how a regional bank holding a $500 million multifamily portfolio could reduce risk-weighted assets from $500 million to $78.1 million (16% of original) through a CRT, and identifies strongest CRT candidates as stabilized income-producing properties and smaller-balance owner-occupied commercial properties with strong fundamentals that diverge from their regulatory risk weights.
The document examines how the Federal Reserve, OCC, and FDIC's new model risk management guidance SR 26-02 (issued April 17, 2026) replaces the 15-year-old SR 11-7 framework, with key changes including a narrower model definition that excludes spreadsheet arithmetic and deterministic rule-based systems, explicit carve-outs for generative and agentic AI, and applicability primarily to institutions above $30 billion in assets. The guidance creates a governance gap for AI-driven commercial real estate workflows by placing statistical models within the MRM perimeter while excluding generative layers, extraction pipelines, and orchestration logic, meaning banks have regulatory latitude in deploying agentic AI for CRE underwriting but remain responsible for downstream risks that feed into pricing and credit estimates.