Market Statistics

Commercial mortgage backed securities have become a critical source of capital for commercial mortgage lending. Below are links to charts noting the industry's growth.

CMBS Industry Overview

View CMSA’s Compendium of Statistics for a series of tables and charts on the CMBS, CRE CDO, and real estate equity markets from various sources. The Compendium is updated weekly.

Holders of Commercial & Multifamily Mortgage Loans 
In 1990, commercial and multifamily securitized loans amount to $41.6 billion or 3.8 percent of the total $1,109.0 billion in mortgages outstanding. At year-end, 2007, securitized loans had grown to $913 billion, 28 percent of the $3.3 billion commercial mortgage market. During the same period, commercial bank's share of mortgages has increased from 36 percent to 42 percent while life insurance companies have lost more that half their share from 22 percent in 1990 to 9 percent currently.

Single Family and Commercial / Multifamily Securitization Market Penetration 
The U.S. single family mortgage market is valued at $11.2 trillion as of December 31, 2007. In the roughly 37 years that residential mortgages have been securitized, about 58 percent of the total single family loans outstanding have been packaged into residential mortgage backed securities. How does the commercial mortgage backed securities industry compare? As noted with slide 1 above, $913 billion of the total $3.3 trillion in mortgage loans (included multifamily), or 28 percent, have been securitized. This is a similar pace that the single family securitization industry was on after 17 years. While no one is predicting that commercial securitizations will reach the same levels as single family securitizations, continued growth in market penetration is expected over the next several years.

Market Size Comparison While the growth of commercial mortgage backed securities has been impressive, overall value still trails other asset classes. Based on flow of funds data from the Federal Reserve, the total commercial and multifamily mortgage market stands at just under $3.3 trillion at year end 2007. The corporate bond market was $3.5 trillion; U.S. government securities $5.1 trillion, single family securitizations stood at $6.8 trillion and all single family mortgages amounted to $11.2 trillion.

Investors of CMBS in 2008
Who is buying CMBS? Based on data from Morgan Stanley, investment advisors and money managers are the biggest buyers of CMBS accounting for 28 percent of all activity based on data as of March 31, 2008. Banks were second picking up 23 percent of the market. 

LifeComps Commercial Mortgage Index tracks the performance of a pool of commercial mortgages, measuring quarterly returns, broken down by property type.

The Research and Economics staff of MBA publish a Quarterly Data Book of the latest MBA research on trends and conditions in the commercial/multifamily mortgage industry.