Planning for the commercial real estate maturity wall

The maturity wall is a concentration of commercial mortgage maturities landing in a short window, and its current shape is measured rather than guessed. Per the Mortgage Bankers Association's report on its 2025 Commercial Real Estate Survey of Loan Maturity Volumes, "$875 billion" of the "$5.0 trillion of outstanding commercial mortgages" is scheduled to mature in 2026.

That is 17% of balances, and "a 9% decrease from the $957 billion that was scheduled to mature in 2025." The year-over-year decline is worth sitting with, because the popular version of this story is a wall that keeps growing. The survey says the 2026 slice is smaller than the 2025 slice.

The average hides the exposure

Aggregate percentages are the least useful number in the survey. The distribution is where a borrower finds themselves.

By property type, the same MBA report has 30% of hotel and motel balances coming due in 2026, 23% of industrial, 17% of office, 15% of health care, and 13% of multifamily. A hotel owner and an apartment owner are reading the same headline about a very different year.

By lender channel the spread is wider still: "$396 billion (21%)" for depositories, "$200 billion (25%)" for CMBS, CLOs and other ABS, "$163 billion (29%)" for credit companies, warehouse facilities and other lenders, "$76 billion (10%)" for life insurance companies, and "$39 billion (4%)" for GSEs, FHA and Ginnie Mae. Where your debt sits determines both how much of it rolls and who you will be negotiating with.

Turning a statistic into a schedule

None of the above tells you what to do on a Tuesday. The operational version of the maturity wall is a list of your own loans with their own maturity dates, sorted, with a horizon attached to each one.

The horizon is the part people set too short. A refinance is not a thirty-day task. It runs through valuation, lender selection, underwriting, and whatever the loan documents require, and the borrower who starts the conversation four months out has already lost most of their leverage. Working back from the maturity date is the only way the sequence fits.

Three things belong on that timeline before the maturity itself: the extension option, if there is one, with its own notice deadline; the covenant tests between now and then, because a lender underwrites the borrower they see; and the rate cap, if the loan is floating, because its expiry can land first.

TractTerm, part of Composed Studio, runs a portfolio-wide maturity calendar with configurable warning horizons, so each loan raises its hand at whatever lead time that loan actually needs rather than at a single fleet-wide default. It sits alongside the same portfolio's covenant register and rate structure, which is the point: a maturity is worked with the covenant history and the rate position in view, not in isolation.

TractTerm does not refinance anything, place debt, or advise on whether to extend or sell. It fixes when you find out, and on a refinance that is most of the value.

Two neighboring dates are worth reading next. If the loan carries an extension option, the extension notice deadline usually arrives long before maturity and is easy to miss. If the loan is floating, the reset schedule tells you what debt service looks like on the way to the wall, and the covenant tests you have to clear meanwhile are the commercial real estate loan covenants already in the documents.