Apartment owners face $757 billion of maturities as lenders favor other property types

Executives at Bisnow's National Commercial Real Estate Finance event last week described apartment distress as inevitable, the product of persistent oversupply colliding with the latest increase in borrowing costs while lenders steer capital toward asset classes still delivering returns. Only a few years ago the same buyers were bidding hard for apartment buildings as rents climbed at a historic pace, and the turn is sharp enough that multifamily is now discussed alongside office, even by people who stop short of equating the two.

Behind that shift sits a maturity calendar: roughly $1.8 trillion of multifamily debt comes due over the next decade, and as much as $757 billion of it matures between now and 2028, according to Wall Street Journal figures cited by Bisnow.

The pressure concentrates in loans written between 2020 and 2022, when benchmark rates sat near zero and rents had shot up by double digits in Sun Belt cities, so the debt was sized against assumptions that no longer hold. Apartment prices fell nearly 5% between August 2025 and August 2026, according to MSCI, while overall commercial property prices were flat over the same window, leaving an owner facing refinancing today with a smaller valuation and a more expensive loan at the same time.

Rialto Capital's Joe Bachkosky, who heads special situations investments there, was careful not to put multifamily in office's category and equally careful not to sound reassured. "I'm not saying it's going to get as bad as office," he said. "But it's creating a challenge for an asset class that has been probably one of the stronger-performing asset classes over the last 25, 30 years."

Higher rates have removed any easy exit: stubborn inflation and mounting government debt have pushed the 10-year Treasury yield past 5.3%, and the Federal Reserve's rate hike affirmed that borrowing costs are not coming down soon. That, Bisnow reports, has changed the tenor of conversations between lenders and borrowers, while commercial and multifamily mortgage delinquencies have been inching upward across most lender types, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association's most recent data.

The capital that would ordinarily step into a repricing now has alternatives, the executives said, as lenders pivot toward asset classes delivering better returns and leave apartment owners competing for the same balance sheets as property types lenders currently find more rewarding.

Oxford Properties Group's Andy Field, a senior managing director of investments, made the point that sound operations are no protection when the loan is the problem: if a property carries debt issued before 2023, a maturity can produce an event regardless of how the building is performing. "The day-to-day is great," he said. "Maybe there's some fundamentals that are going against you in the market. But when there's a maturity, there might be an event."

Geography sharpens the picture. A Wafra senior managing director said fundamentals for apartment ownership are "pretty painful" outside New York and San Francisco, where rents have soared over the past year, while Clarion Partners' Gary Rufrano, who leads U.S. transactions there, framed the same gap in capital-markets terms: without solid returns, multifamily is "tough." "People now need to see some demonstrated performance and stop seeing troubles in the ground for people to get a lot more conviction in multi," he said.

Aggregate credit indexes have not yet confirmed the alarm: the Mortgage Bankers Association's most recent CMBS reading put delinquency at 6.53%, down 42 basis points, with the bank book improving to 1.20% and life company, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac rates edging higher while staying under 1%. Those falling aggregate measures can coexist with executives describing inevitable distress, because a maturity calendar is a schedule of future tests rather than a record of losses already taken; the two do not count the same loans.

How those tests get resolved matters more than how many there are, and the answer is forming inside the debt stack rather than at closing tables. The apartment maturity wall, as this publication has argued, is a rescue-capital market, where extensions replace sales and the clearing basis for values gets set by whoever controls the terms. With the 10-year where it is, the refinancing a sponsor needs is priced well above the one it holds, and a lender weighing other property types against apartment paper has every reason to charge for the difference. Rialto's framing, a challenge rather than a collapse, fits a slow negotiated repricing in which the new equity behind an extension, not the headline price of the building, determines who keeps the asset.

The schedule turns each maturity date into a negotiation between an owner with a valuation problem and a lender with alternatives. Watch the extensions: their pricing, their required paydowns, and whether the new money comes from the same lender or a different one. The "event" Field describes is what arrives when that negotiation fails, and it can arrive at a building whose day-to-day operations are fine.