412. Refinancing, Right-Sizing, & Repositioning: $5.49B in CMBS Hard Maturities, Camden Heads South, & Apollo's Austin Bet

**Haley Keen** (0:05)
Welcome to The TreppWire Podcast, the show where commercial real estate meets data and insights. This is our Week in Review for the week ending August 7th, 2026 I'm Haley Keen with Trepp, a data modeling and analytics firm for the CNBS, commercial real estate and CLO markets. I'm with Lonnie Hendry, Chief Product Officer, and Stephen Bushbaum, head of applied research and analytics. This week's economic data delivered a little something for everyone, and not necessarily in a good way. Manufacturing recorded its strongest growth in four years, and surface sector demand remained healthy. At the same time, private hiring disappointed, job openings continue to cool, and businesses reported persistent cost pressures. Higher rates are also weighing on construction, mortgage applications and other interest rate sensitive parts of the economy. In the commercial real estate headlines, today we'll discuss Camden's $1.63 billion exit from California Multifamily, and its decision to reinvest in newer Sunbelt properties.
We'll also look at Best Buy's push into smaller stores, Apollo's decision to establish a second headquarters in Austin, and the surprising rise in lumber prices despite weakening home construction.
Then in our Digging Through the Data segment, we'll examine August CNBS hard maturities, and take a closer look at the five largest loans approaching their final maturity dates. Stephen, after last week's volatility in the Treasury market, did this week's economic data provide any clearer direction?

**Stephen Bushbaum** (1:40)
I'm not sure that it really gave us any clear direction.
It did, however, clarify some of the tension. The best way to describe this economy may be strong output without much hiring.
The ISM manufacturing index jumped to 55.6, its highest level in four years, with strong production and new orders. The services data told a similar demand story, with business activity approaching 60 and new orders continuing to accelerate. But employers remain cautious. Job openings declined to 7.36 million. ADP reported only 44,000 new private sector jobs, and services employment index fell back in the contraction territory. This still looks more like a slow hire, slow fire labor market than one experiencing widespread job losses. I will call one additional data point from that ADP print on Wednesday. It was a little bit concerning, is that you saw weakness in leisure services. In other words, this is still in the part of travel season. And so seeing weakness in the leisure sector, in hospitality services, is to me a little bit concerning going into the fall and really highlights just how important it will be to get that back to school spending and then heading into November, the seasonality and holiday sales. The difficult part for the Fed is that softer hiring has not been accompanied by much relief in prices. The manufacturing and services prices index both remained above 70, indicating significant input cost pressure. And the effects of higher rates are becoming more visible. Construction spending declined both monthly and year over year. Multi-family construction, weekends and mortgage applications fell as that 30 year rate reached 6.81%.
The economy is not rolling over here, but the rate sensitive sectors are clearly feeling the squeeze and that tension with healthy demand on one side and higher financing and operating costs on the other runs through nearly every CRE story we're discussing today.

**Lonnie Hendry** (3:45)
Yeah, I was going to jump on the mortgage application nugget there, Steven. You mentioned the 6.81% rate. The push-pull for residential mortgage applications has been about 6.6%, 6.7%. When it's gone above that, you really feel the brakes being applied. And I think at 6.81%, with really no potential relief in sight, it's going to be a tough slog. And tying some of the residential maybe into the leisure story, I mean, pull up any article you can find on Airbnbs across the US right now, and they're all for sale.
None of them are selling, and prices are just being reduced over and over and over again. And some of them are taking them off the market, trying to wait 30 or 60 days and resetting. But there's going to be a pretty significant slowdown, in my opinion, if rates stay like this across the residential markets. I know we did a kind of deep dive two or three weeks ago, but things have deteriorated even since then.

**Stephen Bushbaum** (4:39)
Yeah, I'm really interested to see what Friday's jobs print will look like for this month and what's going to happen with the unemployment rate. If I'm not mistaken, I think labor force participation declined slightly last month. And so what we could see on Friday is a slight increase in the participation, a slight increase in the participation rate that could cause that unemployment rate to break higher. And then if non-farm payrolls comes in on the cooler side, it makes things really interesting for the Fed decision in September. I'll be really interested to see how Treasury markets respond. And if things maybe break lower and we have an increase in bets for another Fed hold. Now, obviously, if things come in, even lukewarm to warm on that data, well, yeah, I'm guessing still the chatter about potentially a hike coming in September still isn't the cards. But for me, I'm interested to see really if things break on the weaker side, how markets start pricing in that September Fed decision.