ABA Survey: 8 in 10 Banks Plan to Expand CRE Volume in 2016

Results from the first-ever ABA Commercial Real Estate survey point to a healthy 2016 when it comes to commercial real estate lending.
As covered in Multi-Housing News on Wednesday, 80 percent of the banks surveyed said they plan to increase commercial real estate concentrations in 2016.
Writer Dess Stribling points out that this robust environment likely means more competition for deals:
Bankers cited competition from other banks as their biggest challenge when it came to CRE lending—not, as it happens, the difficulties involved in dealing with regulatory requirements, or even competition from non-banks. Even so, the bankers said they were concerned about regulatory burden, low capitalization rates, increasing interest rates, as well as economic and market conditions.
Considering that the most active commercial asset classes were multifamily, office and retail (comprising 62 percent of the surveyed bank’s total CRE portfolios), qualified apartment borrowers should have an ample debt sources to choose from this year.