SASB's dominance redefines the CMBS rebound

The rebound in CMBS issuance is on pace to punch through Trepp's original forecast for 2026, built by single-asset, single-borrower deals rather than the broad conduit market of pre-COVID cycles. Trepp counts more than $90 billion scheduled to close through early September and now projects nearly $140 billion for the year, up from an initial call of $130 billion, extending a two-year climb from $108 billion in 2024 to $126.6 billion in 2025.

In an interview with Commercial Observer published Sept. 1, Trepp's Stephen Buschbom, head of applied research and analytics, and Andy Boettcher, head of research, laid out the composition: of roughly $92.6 billion in private-label issuance announced so far this year, about $69 billion, or 75 percent, has been SASB. Buschbom says that split is much different from the pre-COVID market, with the channel tilting toward SASB since the financial crisis and, over the past two years, becoming the dominant origination channel.

The concentration is not an accident of the calendar. Boettcher traces it to the buyer side, where pension funds and banks required to hold triple-A paper use single-asset deals to build exactly the exposure they want, an overweight to New York, say, rather than take the diversified risk of a conduit. A conduit investor accepts what the pool offers, while a SASB investor takes a position on one property and one borrower, a different capital market function with consequences for how this cycle will be refinanced.

Distress is running on the same long tail Buschbom has been mapping since the last crisis: after the 2008 collapse, delinquency did not peak until four years after AIG and Lehman Brothers, and he expects the office stress to play out along a similar arc because leases roll slowly while companies reassess their space needs. That timeline frames the current issuance story, in which buyers of new paper are underwriting specific assets that have already found their clearing price, rather than a general credit turn.

The long tail also explains why 2026 looks like the year lenders hoped for: Buschbom says that, in 2022 through 2024, his team's best guess was that the market would stabilize enough by this year to bring transactional volume back, and it has, but the stability is showing up in slices. The office buildings still grinding through lease expirations are not the ones being securitized; the seven-figure rent rolls and fully leased logistics boxes are.

The SASB share also explains why issuance has been able to accelerate without a broad origination market behind it, since a conduit requires a pipeline of loans that depend on the general transactional market while a single-asset deal needs only one sponsor, one property, and one buyer who wants that exposure. The 75 percent figure is therefore less about securitization capacity than about where credit is actually clearing: at the level of the individual building.

For a market that spent two years waiting for volume to return, the top-line number is good news, but the mix cuts against the broad recovery story: an issuance market that is three-quarters single-asset is clearing specific trophy and income properties, not the middle of the stack. Conduit volume, which distributes risk across dozens of loans and owners, is the better gauge of general credit appetite and still the smaller share; the maturity wall just turned into a rates problem, as this publication has argued, and if the next hard-maturity cohort comes due with the Fed silent, a pipeline this dependent on bespoke deals is not the same thing as a liquid refinancing market.

Trepp's own mix points to the former, and the fourth-quarter conduit calendar will determine whether the recovery is real. If SASB keeps consuming the pipeline, the 2026 rebound is a trophy market with a securitized wrapper and the year-end total will flatter the credit cycle as a whole; if conduit issuance steps back in, the recovery reaches the places that matter to most lenders.