Somewhere in almost every CRE loan closing, there's a moment the room gets quiet: the guaranty signature page. The property is owned by an LLC. The loan is made to the LLC. But the signature on that page belongs to a person, and it puts that person'
Ask a first-time CRE borrower who they're getting their loan from and the answer is usually "my bank." Ask a twenty-year sponsor the same question and the answer is "it depends on the deal." That difference in mindset is worth real money.
Every CRE deal has a capital stack, and every capital stack has a gap. The senior lender will go to 65% of the deal. Your equity investors want to contribute 20%. That leaves 15% of the capitalization unaccounted for, and the deal doesn't close until someone fills it.
Construction lending is where CRE financing gets complicated. You're not buying an existing asset that generates income. You're building a future asset that doesn't exist yet, funded in stages over 12-36 months, with cost overruns, timeline slippage, weather delays, permitting issues, and market
We're at the halfway point of 2026. Time to check the scoreboard. Six months ago, our January outlook framed 2026 as a year of stabilization after two years of pricing volatility, tightening credit, and record maturities. The consensus was that rates would stabilize, capital would return, and transaction
A CRE borrower runs a competitive financing process in 2026. Five lenders quote the deal. Term sheets arrive over the course of two weeks, in five different formats: two PDFs, one Word document, one that's essentially a marked-up letter, and one that opens in a proprietary lender
Open any commercial real estate term sheet and you'll see one of three benchmarks: SOFR, Prime, or Treasury. Each one is a different reference rate that determines your loan pricing, and which one your loan is built on has major implications for your cost of capital, your interest
Office has been the most stressed asset class in commercial real estate for five years. Vacancy at post-WWII record highs. CMBS office delinquencies above 11%. Property values down 30-40% from 2022 peaks. Major gateway cities seeing vacancy north of 25%. If you've tried to finance an
You ran a competitive financing process. Five lenders responded. Three issued term sheets. Now you have to pick one. This is where most borrowers make the wrong decision. The instinct is to compare interest rates. Lender A is at 6.25%, Lender B is at 6.50%, Lender C is
Most CRE deals die quietly. The lender doesn't slam the door. They just stop returning calls. Behind the silence is almost always one of a handful of red flags. The borrower presented something, did something, or revealed something that made the lender decide this deal wasn't
For most of CRE history, industrial was the unglamorous sibling. While office towers attracted institutional capital and multifamily was the headline asset class, warehouses sat quietly in the background, generating steady cash flow nobody wanted to talk about. That changed during the e-commerce boom. Industrial became the most coveted
Most CRE deals are won or lost before a lender or investor ever looks at the numbers. The deciding factor isn't the cap rate, the rent roll, or the sponsor. It's whether the offering memorandum makes the deal feel obvious. A great OM doesn't