NEW YORK CITY—Even as retail's long-term prospects appear strong, it can't be denied that the sector bore a resemblance to Cape Hatteras this past year, in the sense of being littered with the shipwrecks of store concepts that sank into bankruptcy. As one measure of this culling of the weakest members of the herd, some $35 billion of CMBS faces exposure to the 11 largest bankruptcies to occur in 2017, according to Trepp LLC.

More than one-third of that total is concentrated in a single operator that filed for Chapter 11 protection this past January and subsequently closed all 250 of its brick-and-mortar US locations. The Limited, which subsequently was acquired by private equity firm Sycamore Partners and later relaunched as an e-commerce brand, figures in about $14.7 billion of securitized debt across 127 notes, Trepp says. That being said, Trepp notes that the majority of these loans are collateralized by large regional malls that didn't feature The Limited as one of their five largest tenants by square footage.

By exposure to CMBS debt, the sector's second-largest bankruptcy filing this year was by a retailer that is still open for business this holiday season. Trepp says that a total of $5.6 billion in CMBS debt is exposed to retail properties that feature Toys “R” Us or Babies “R” Us as a top-five tenant.