Commercial Real Estate Distress in 2026: Navigating Market Cycles and Lender Relations
With roughly $875 billion in commercial and multifamily mortgages maturing in 2026, borrowers are facing DSCR trips, cash management, and carve-out exposure. What sponsors, guarantors, and buyers should be doing right now.
Q2 2026 Deal Maker Report: Litigation was the Defining Theme
Across commercial real estate, private capital, and M&A, we’ve watched pressure build into action. Lenders are becoming more aggressive. Litigation is increasing. Distressed assets are creating both risk and opportunity. And the professionals who are succeeding aren’t the ones hoping the market changes—they’re the ones adapting to it.
Zombie Mortgages: Can a 20-Year-Old Loan Really Take Your Home?
Short answer: A “zombie mortgage” is an old second mortgage — often a pre-2008 piggyback loan — that homeowners thought was forgiven or written off, but that a debt collector is now trying to revive and collect on, sometimes for double the original balance. Many of these debts are time-barred by the statute of limitations, […]
Q1 2026 Dealmaker Report: What’s Actually Moving the Market
We’ve pulled together our Q1 2026 Dealmaker Report designed to give you a clear, practical view of what’s really happening across capital markets right now.
Workout Strategy Without Making It Worse
The Guarantor’s Defense — Part 5 of 5 When a commercial real estate deal is in distress, the guarantor faces a set of decisions that will define both the outcome of the property and the extent of personal exposure. Those decisions are often made under pressure, without enough information, and sometimes without the right counsel. […]
Negotiating the Guaranty Before You Sign
The Guarantor’s Defense — Part 4 of 5 Most guarantors sign what they are handed. The lender’s counsel prepares the guaranty. The borrower’s counsel reviews it and may flag obvious problems. At closing, with a deal in progress and momentum behind it, the guaranty is often treated as standard and signed without significant negotiation. That […]
What the SPE Covenants Actually Say — And What Violates Them
The Guarantor’s Defense — Part 3 of 5 Single-purpose entity covenants appear in virtually every institutional commercial real estate loan. They are often presented as routine. They are not. These provisions impose ongoing behavioral obligations on the borrowing entity throughout the life of the loan. Violations do not require fraud or intent. Many occur under […]
Causation Is Not Automatic — Make Them Prove It
The Guarantor’s Defense — Part 2 of 5 In carve-out guaranty litigation, borrowers and guarantors often treat a finding of breach as the end of the analysis. It is not. A breach of a carve-out provision establishes that a prohibited act occurred. It does not automatically establish that the lender suffered a loss as a […]
The Lender’s Own Hands Are Not Clean
The Guarantor’s Defense — Part 1 of 5 When a commercial real estate project fails, the narrative tends to run one direction. The lender asserts that the borrower mismanaged the collateral, diverted funds, committed waste, or violated covenants. The guarantor is then asked to pay. What often goes unexamined is the lender’s own conduct during […]
DSCR, Debt Yield, and Recourse Exposure: When Financial Metrics Become Personal Risk
Most commercial real estate borrowers understand that lenders underwrite to ratios, debt service coverage ratio (DSCR), debt yield, and sometimes loan-to-value. What many guarantors do not fully appreciate is how those financial metrics can indirectly create recourse exposure under a bad boy guaranty. DSCR and debt yield do not usually trigger recourse by themselves. But […]
