The pace

US private-label commercial mortgage-backed securities issuance is tracking toward roughly $136 billion to $140 billion for 2026, according to estimates from data firm Trepp reported in early September. More than $90 billion had closed or was scheduled to close by that point, already exceeding Trepp's original full-year forecast of $130 billion.

For comparison, full-year issuance was $126.6 billion in 2025 and $108 billion in 2024 — implying growth of roughly 8 percent on last year and 26 percent on the year before.

Official Securities and Exchange Commission statistics, which lag, recorded 90 CMBS issuances totalling $54.2 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone.

The composition has changed

Roughly 75 percent of 2026 issuance — about $69 billion of the $92.6 billion cited in early September — came through single-asset, single-borrower structures rather than conduit pools. Through July, on a loan-balance basis, SASB deals accounted for $58.0 billion of $76.2 billion, against $16.1 billion in conduit.

This matters for risk. A conduit pool diversifies across dozens of loans, property types and markets; an SASB deal is an undiversified bet on one building and one borrower, tranched by seniority. The market's growth is therefore not a broad revival of securitised lending so much as a channel for financing large individual assets that banks are reluctant to hold.

Office was the largest single property type through July at 22.7 percent of issuance, or $17.3 billion, ahead of industrial and multifamily at roughly 17.3 percent each. Multifamily carried the thinnest debt yield at 8.20 percent and the highest loan-to-value at 68.4 percent; lodging had the widest debt yield at 12.69 percent.

Industrial's rise and a long tail of distress

Through August, $14.93 billion of industrial-backed CMBS loans had been securitised, above the full-year 2025 total of $18.56 billion on a pace basis, lifting industrial's share to 17.01 percent of an $87.75 billion year-to-date total from 14.55 percent in 2025. Average industrial loan-to-value reached 61.2 percent. One representative deal, MTN Commercial Mortgage Trust 2026-LPFX, was backed by a $1.28 billion loan within a $1.62 billion financing on 90 industrial properties totalling 19.2 million square feet.

Trepp's Stephen Buschbom drew a historical parallel in interviews: CMBS delinquency after the 2008 crisis did not peak until roughly four years after the Lehman Brothers collapse, implying that office-driven distress in the current cycle has a long tail regardless of how strong new issuance looks.

Caveats: year-to-date totals differ across the cited Trepp pieces ($76.2 billion through July, $87.75 billion and $92.6 billion in later August-cutoff reports) because they use different as-of dates; they are not contradictory and should not be conflated. Trepp's figures are proprietary research and cannot be independently audited. The SEC's own issuance statistics are public-domain but covered only through the first quarter at the time of reporting.