2023 Q2 Databook

September 29, 2023 Jamie Woodwell; Reggie Booker

Commercial real estate is a large and heterogeneous market.  Of the $4.6 trillion of commercial mortgage debt outstanding, roughly $2 trillion is backed by multifamily properties, $750 billion by office loans, $420 billion by retail, $360 billion by industrial and $300 billion by hotel, with the remainder in health care, self-storage, mixed use, and a host of other income-producing properties.  

Even within property types, there is remarkable diversity – across property subtypes, markets, property age, deal age, size and more.  Looking just at deal size, more than one-third of the multifamily loans that were made last year were for less than $1 million. Almost one-quarter were for less than $500,000. These small loans are largely the domain of the banks. The average size of a multifamily loan made for a bank portfolio was $3.9 million in 2022, compared to averages of $38 million for life companies and CMBS, $19 million for FHA and $18 million for Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. The bank lending accounted for 77 percent of the loans (51,931 of the total 67,191) but just 42 percent of the dollar volume ($201 billion out of $480 billion).

In today’s market, each commercial property and mortgage sits in a unique place, driven by how it is being affected by changes in the space markets, equity markets and debt markets – all of which are going through adjustments.

PROPERTY FUNDAMENTALS

In terms of supply of and demand for commercial real estate – and therefore changes in rents, vacancies and net operating incomes – different properties, property types and markets are experiencing very different conditions.