CMBS origination essentially dried up after the market downturn in 2008, and its revival is not likely to produce the multibillion-dollar conduit offerings of 2006 and 2007 right away. Issuers who have been on the sidelines are planning new securitizations “after some more deals have hit the market,” says Levine. The Times cites Wells Fargo, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley among them.

“To the extent that we keep seeing interest from the bond buyers and the deals continue to price well, we’ll see more lenders stepping back into the arena,” Levine says. Even now, he adds, “there’s a good number of programs that are actively originating.”

To date, however, those programs generally haven’t come out of smaller institutions. “Maybe there’s a few here and there that will try to contribute collateral to a deal, but I haven’t seen many of the smaller shops active in CMBS,” says Levine. They’re watching and waiting to see how the market re-develops, he adds.

Levine predicts that we’ll start seeing lenders teaming up to do CMBS deals, “because the reality is that there’s just not that much activity in the market. There’s a desire for them to be making loans, but the investment sales market still hasn’t ramped back up. So there’s just not enough product in the market to get the kind of pools out that we were used to seeing.” Smaller pools will be the rule for a while, he says.

Built in 1958, the nine-story retail condo at 660 Madison is home to the flagship Barneys New York store. The present ownership bought it and two other Barneys locations from Japanese department store firm Isetan Co. Ltd. for $180 million in 2001. Broadway Partners sold the property’s 254,000-square-foot office component to Etoile 660 Madison LLC for $375 million in the fall of 2007.