Let's talk numbers for a second: Approximately $1.2 TRILLION in CRE loans to mature next year. That's not a typo, and it's not evenly spread out over the past several years or those to come. It's a wave, and it's about 19% bigger than what we thought last year. Add in the fact that new loans are pricing around 6.24% against 4.76% on the paper coming due, and you've got a lot of borrowers staring at refinancing costs they didn't budget for.
Banks are holding roughly 60% of that near-term maturity load. For two years, a lot of lenders extended instead of forcing the issue. That bought time. It didn't make the problem disappear, it just moved it. Here's what that means for the people underwriting these deals: more files, more pressure, zero patience for inconsistency. This is exactly where Baker Hill UN/FY does its job. Intelligent document management and automated spreading of financials pulls the numbers out of messy borrower documents and standardizes them without a human re-keying everything by hand. Using AI to help identify policy enforcement, keeps the risk grading consistent across every deal, not "consistent when we're not slammed," but rather consistent period – end of story. That's the whole point of a loan origination platform: when volume spikes, your credit discipline shouldn't be the thing that bends.
But I'll be straight with you, especially when it is CRE, getting a deal approved is only half the fight. The other half starts the second underwriting says yes, and it's a mess most lenders don't talk about enough: due diligence.
CREtelligent's CEO, Anthony Romano III, put out a white paper recently that nails this. Properties don't line up neatly with parcel boundaries. Collateral data is scattered across a dozen disconnected sources. Lenders are juggling due diligence vendor panels of 30-plus firms. And the ordering process is still mostly manual: emails, signatures, status-chasing. All of that adds days to a closing that should already be moving and on a deal where if you can save a basis point because of efficiencies, that matters in the long haul.
Anthony and his team get the disclosure challenge. I'm not going to pretend that's our lane, but when you have partners like CREtelligent that own that space, you sleep better at night. If you're anywhere near the closing side of a CRE deal, go read it. It's a sharp, honest look at a problem that's only going to get louder as the refinancing wave hits every stage of the pipeline, not just origination.
Complexity doesn't live in one spot in this business. It compounds from start to finish. We're focused here at Baker Hill on making sure the front half of that chain doesn't slow you down or grade deals inconsistently. What CREtelligent's building toward on the back half is worth your attention too, especially this year, as you look to compete in the thin margins.