421. Beyond the Headlines: Office Distress, a $30.6B Multifamily Maturity Test, & Western CRE’s Mixed Signals | LIVE at California MBA's WSCREF

Haley Keane (0:05)

Welcome to The TreppWire Podcast, the show where commercial real estate meets data and insights. This is a special edition of our Week in Review for the week ending September 11th, 2026 I'm Haley Keane with Trepp, a data modeling and analytics firm for the CMBS, commercial real estate, and CLO markets. I'm with Lonnie Hendry, Chief Product Officer and Steven Bushbaum, Head of Applied Research and Analytics. This week, we're bringing you a special edition of the show, which we recorded live at the California MBA Western States CREF Conference in Las Vegas. We took the stage for a conversation called Beyond the Headlines, What the Data Really Says About Western CRE. We looked at why some of the signals in commercial real estate seem to contradict each other right now, then dug into what the data is showing across Western office, life sciences, multifamily, and self-storage. We also got into the maturity wall ahead, why the story can change pretty dramatically from one market to the next, and two individual deals that show just how differently property performance, financing, and credit can play out. For this week's episode, we're bringing you that full live conversation. Let's get into the show.

Stephen Bushbaum (1:11)

The TreppWire team.

Haley Keane (1:16)

Thank you so much, Cody, and thank you to the entire organization here at the California MBA for having us. We're so excited to do a live version of our show here. What we're doing right now is we're actually recording with these mics, and we'll release it across our channels tonight. So we started our podcast, like Cody said, back in March 2020 It's a weekly show just to try to make sense of the news and how it's impacting commercial real estate. We didn't think we'd have so much to talk about every week, but six plus years later, we're still going. And that's why we kind of want to jump in right away here. We have a lot to cover. If you're a listener, you know we try to squeeze a lot in to an almost hour long episode, but we want to make it interesting. We want to share some data and tidbits and really give a behind the scenes look at commercial real estate. So we called today's session Beyond the Headlines because as you all know, you're following the commercial real estate markets every day, the topics, the headlines, even the individual data points that you may see can sometimes contradict one another. Leasing can be improving while credit conditions are deteriorating, capital can come back before fundamentals fully recover at the property, and sometimes a property with weakening fundamentals can refinance when a stronger one can't. So we've been trying to make sense of why all of this is occurring at once, and Stephen, you have a pretty useful framework for looking at this. Why don't you kick us off here and walk us through it?

Stephen Bushbaum (2:44)

Love to.

So when we read through the headlines, we get this mixture of positive and negative at the same time, and trying to come up with a framework to digest it is what brought us to this idea of a three-clock system. You have the property clock that deals with your leasing and occupancy, your property income statement, so basically the property fundamentals. Then you have the capital clock that's dealing with capital market conditions. So what's your underlying coupon on the loan?

What do broader refinancing conditions look like in the market and your cost of capital? And then, well, your loan structure. When is your refinancing pressure going to come up? Then you have your credit clock. So are you just on the watch list? You're still current on payments. You're not yet delinquent, but there's clearly some concerns that have crept up. Or have you progressed to, say, payment default? Or, I mean, it goes this way, it's oftentimes, a receiver gets put in place and it looks like it's headed toward foreclosure. Or, maybe you're staving that off and you're working through toward a modification outcome. So we have these three clocks, the property, the capital, and the credit clock. And what we've seen over the last couple of years is that maturity is the great synchronization event. That's what forces all of these clocks to come into sync, and is the lenses through which we'll look at the headlines, the data, and try and understand why sometimes things look out of sync, or alternatively, when they're going to synchronize, and will result in either a positive or a negative outcome.

Lonnie Hendry (4:16)

Yeah, so Stephen, we've been saying for a while that you can have contradictory things being true at the same time, and your clock framework highlights that, because the market doesn't move as one, and we're seeing this more and more today than ever before. We live in an interconnected world, but we tried to, you know, for this episode, we're going to try to bring things from a macro to a micro to a property level, just so that we can kind of track. We've kind of brought in a couple of narratives here. The four I's and the four T's, we'll get to in just a second. We think the four I's that really dominate the market today is interest rate, inflation, Iran and the oil, and insurance at the property level. And so we won't belabor these. I think we're all pretty well aware of what's happening. I mean, the 10-year treasury, I think today was over 4.9. For us, it feels like the push-pull for the market is around 5 If we get to 5%, I think things are going to really slow down.