Refinancing costs are rising sharply on the $100 billion in loans coming due over the next nine months
More than 2,600 conduit and SBLL CMBS loans, carrying a combined outstanding balance over $100 billion, mature over the next nine months. The balance-weighted distress rate across that pool is 5.55 percent — a manageable-looking average that hides which property type is really under stress, how concentrated the balance is geographically, and which loans that look fine today are headed for a far harder refinancing.
Multifamily Is Under Stress and Relief Isn’t Coming
Office carries the highest distress rate of any major property type in this maturing pool, at 9.4 percent on $23.86 billion — unsurprising. More telling: multifamily, at $5.01 billion, shows a 7.5 percent distress rate — higher than retail’s 3.5 percent and higher than hotel’s 4.4 percent. Multifamily is conventionally treated as the safer bet, especially set against retail’s long-running “death of the mall” narrative. In this pool, it’s the other way around.
Refinancing Costs Are Landing Far Harder on Some Property Types Than Others
Distress rates capture what’s already gone wrong. They don’t capture what’s coming. Across office, hotel, industrial, retail, mixed-use and multifamily debt maturing in this window, the average note rate on those loans today is 5.44 percent. Loans actually originated between May and August of this year — the real cost of replacing that debt — are pricing at a loan-weighted 6.58 percent, a gap of about 114 basis points that applies whether or not a loan is currently flagged as distressed.
| Property Type | Rate on Maturing Loan | New-Origination Rate | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mixed-Use | 5.04% | 6.82% | +178 bps |
| Retail | 4.77% | 6.50% | +173 bps |
| Office | 5.14% | 6.86% | +172 bps |
| Multifamily | 5.00% | 5.65% | +65 bps |
| Industrial | 5.93% | 6.52% | +59 bps |
| Hotel | 6.17% | 6.50% | +32 bps |
That gap isn’t uniform, and it doesn’t track with where distress is showing up today. Mixed-use and retail — two of the cleanest performers on trailing distress — face the widest resets, at +178 and +173 basis points; office is close behind at +172. Hotel, despite carrying the highest current rate of any major property type, faces the smallest gap, just +32 bps, because those loans were already priced closer to today’s market. A loan with no problems today can still walk into a materially higher payment the moment it refinances. Call it shadow distress: a risk hiding inside this wall’s currently “clean” loans that today’s distress numbers alone will never show.
A Fifth of the Entire Maturity Wall Sits in One Metro
Just 10 of the 371 metro areas in this data account for 57.8 percent of the full $87.8 billion balance. New York-Newark-Jersey City alone is $15.87 billion — 18.1 percent of the national total. Los Angeles ($7.81B) and San Francisco ($4.70B) round out the top three. The map below shows the concentration: a wall sitting hard in a handful of gateway markets, not spread evenly across the country.
CMBS Maturity Wall — balance maturing by metro
The Maturity Wall Has Many Large Bricks
A single retail property in Honolulu carries a $1.73 billion loan maturing in June 2027 — larger than the combined balance maturing in most other metros in this data. It’s almost certainly Ala Moana Center, given its scale and financing history. That’s the largest single loan in the entire maturity wall, but it isn’t the only brick this size.
A $1.69 billion office loan on Binney Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts — in the heart of the Kendall Square life-science and lab-office corridor — matures in May 2027. A $1.52 billion retail loan on Fallbrook Avenue in Los Angeles matures in March 2027. In New York, three trophy office towers on Sixth Avenue and Park Avenue alone account for well over $1.4 billion in maturing balance across three different months: 1290 Avenue of the Americas ($673 million, November 2026), 1095 Avenue of the Americas ($544 million, February 2027), and 280 Park Avenue ($430 million, September 2026).
These loans aren’t uniformly healthy, either. 280 Park Avenue is already showing real strain, while its Sixth Avenue counterparts and Ala Moana Center are considered comfortable performers today — though comfortable now is exactly the kind of loan the shadow distress problem above is about. Whatever shape each loan is in today, its outcome — refinanced smoothly, extended, or handed back — is large enough to move the numbers for its entire metro and, in some cases, for the property type nationally. A reminder that a handful of single-asset loans can swing those numbers on their own, and that the loan-level detail is where the real risk in this maturity wall actually lives.
What’s Actually Driving the Worst Pockets of Distress
January 2027’s distressed balance is spread across four office loans in four separate gateway metros — New York, Washington, Seattle, and San Francisco — all stressed in the same 30-day window. That’s not one bad loan; it’s an office-specific pattern hitting four of the country’s largest office markets at once. September 2026 tells a different story: a lodging portfolio and a Chicago office loan are fully distressed, but a $699.7 million New York office loan, only 10.4 percent distressed, still contributes more dollars just by being large — size and distress rate both doing real work.
The Takeaway
The 5.55 percent headline distress rate is a reasonable-looking average built from pieces that disagree: a national number that’s really a New York number in disguise, a property type reputation that doesn’t hold up in this cohort, and a refinancing reset hitting some property types far harder than others — one that will eventually catch today’s clean, performing loans too.
Source: CRED iQ proprietary CMBS loan-level analytics. Conduit and SBLL deal types only. Loans maturing September 1, 2026 through June 30, 2027.
