Simple math explains why Heck expects more of these types of opportunities. If you have a $10-million property and you put a 65%, five-year CMBS loan on it in 2005 and your value then dropped by 30% to $7 million due to the recession, you're going to need to bring $3 million to the table next year in order to refinance because banks are now only lending on 50% of the value.

That, basically, is what happened to Business Property Trust of Portland, which recently sold Berkeley Capital Trust an 80%-leased, 153,000-square foot industrial development in the Rancho Cordova submarket here for the property's CMBS loan balance of $6.63 million or $43.47 per square foot. The property was appraised at $9.81 million in 2004 but rents due to the recession have since fallen from the $0.80s and $0.90s per square foot per month to the $0.50s per square foot. The loan was coming due in January 2010.

"It would have been impossible for [the seller] to refinance because he would have to pay down the debt to 50% of the value," Heck says. "He would have had to come up with millions of dollars and that kind of equity is tough to come by."