Welcome to CMBS 2.0

Although the delinquency rate on legacy CMBS continues to tick upward, securitization has risen from the ashes of the 2008-2009 capital-markets fire storm. The phoenix is still finding its wings, though, and even the most upbeat predictions don’t anticipate that the volume of new CMBS this year will reach more than about 14% of the $207 billion achieved in 2007. Yet what industry players are calling CMBS 2.0 is gaining altitude.

Investors and other stakeholders should be clear on what distinguishes it from, well, CMBS 1.0. Actually, the reboot of CMBS bears a pretty strong resemblance to that first generation of commercial mortgage securitizations, in that conduit lenders are cautiously feeling their way along. “We’re a lot closer to 1.2 or 1.3 than 2.0 based on the transactions we’ve seen,” commented Stacey Berger, EVP at Midland Loan Services, during a July webinar presented by GlobeSt.com.