And the year’s final quarter is on pace to keep the momentum going. In the past couple of weeks alone, Fitch, Standard & Poor’s and Kroll Bond Rating Agency have issued presale reports on more than $4 billion of new securitized issues through institutional lenders, along with a $1.4-billion issue of multifamily pass-through certificates from Freddie Mac. These have ranged from an $835-million single-borrower transaction backed by the 1.86-million-square-foot Fashion Show Mall on the Las Vegas Strip to COMM 2012-CCRE4, a $1.1-billion multi-borrower package of pass-through certificates that represent the beneficial interests in 48 commercial mortgage loans secured by 152 properties.

Given that the CMBS market cratered after the capital markets collapse, its post-crisis growth, while not spectacular, has been steady compared to that seen in the EMEA market, Fitch says in a separate report. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that new private issues could reach $46 billion this year and exceed $60 billion in 2013.

“There are a large number of bad loans and downgraded deals out there, so in some ways it’s a bit of an anomaly that there is still demand from investors to buy new CMBS," Huxley Somerville, New York City-based managing director of structured finance for Fitch, comments in a Q&A comparing US and EMEA CMBS. “However, yield considerations aside, I believe it’s because investors understand that the lax underwriting of 2006-2008 is no longer occurring and that there is a solid history of performance for transactions that came to market in the decade prior to 2005.” Somerville adds that the performance of circa 2006-2008 deals “is not tainting the market to the extent it does in Europe, where it affected a bigger portion of the overall CMBS market because the CMBS market itself developed over a shorter time period.”