MBA's 2025 maturity survey breaks $875B of 2026 maturities down by who's holding the paper: depositories carry $396B, 21% of their own CRE books. CMBS, CLO and ABS hold $200B, a full 25% of their outstanding. Credit companies and other non-bank lenders hold $163B, life companies $76B, agency $39B. That depository concentration is exactly why banks are also the channel tightening hardest on renewal terms right now, which pushes volume toward the non-bank sources below.
Banks pulled back on construction and transitional deals well before rates moved, balance sheet discipline, not appetite, did most of that work. Debt funds stepped into the gap and haven't given it back. On the files we placed last year, non-bank sources took the largest share of anything that wasn't a stabilized agency refinance.
Bridge-to-stabilization multi-family, transitional industrial, and value-add hospitality see the most debt fund competition we track, often three or more term sheets on a single file. Ground-up construction and special-purpose assets see fewer bidders, but the ones who show up have real conviction, not just a rate sheet.
Higher yield than a bank, and usually more flexibility around prepay and future funding for capex. The trade is often worth it when the business plan needs the runway a bank won't give, but only if the exit is real. A debt fund will underwrite the takeout as hard as the loan.
"A debt fund isn't a bank with a higher rate. It's a different underwriting conversation, about the plan, not just the collateral."
Non-bank appetite moves faster than bank appetite in both directions, a fund that was aggressive on hospitality bridge loans six months ago may have pulled back after a string of extensions across its book. This is exactly why a maintained view of live placement matters more than a static lender list: yesterday's strong fit can be today's pass.
For a referred file, this is where a deeper bench pays off directly: a client's deal that a bank passes on isn't dead, it's misrouted. Matching it to the right non-bank source, the one actually funding that asset class and structure this quarter, is often the difference between a stalled referral and a closed one.