Smart commercial mortgage solutions, built around your deal.

A commercial mortgage is a loan secured by property held for business or investment use rather than as a primary residence. Office buildings, retail centres, industrial and flex space, mixed-use buildings, self-storage, hospitality and most special-purpose assets all sit under that heading, as do apartment buildings of five units or more.

The practical difference between a commercial mortgage and a home loan is what gets underwritten. A residential lender underwrites you first: salary, credit file, personal debt load. A commercial lender underwrites the property first. It wants to know what the asset earns, how reliably it earns it, and whether that income comfortably covers the payment. Your credit and your track record still matter, but they are the second question rather than the first.

That single shift explains most of what surprises borrowers the first time through. The term is usually shorter than the amortization schedule, so a loan can be written on a twenty-five or thirty-year payment schedule and still come due in five, seven or ten years. Loans are normally made to an entity rather than an individual. Prepayment is often restricted. And the range of workable structures is far wider, because there is no single national rulebook the way there is in residential lending.

It also explains why the same deal can be priced very differently by two lenders on the same morning. If you want the full sequence from first call to closing table, read our walkthrough of the commercial real estate financing process. Otherwise, keep reading for what lenders actually check.

Every lender words it differently, but nearly all of them are testing the same five things. Knowing where you stand on each before you apply is the difference between a clean approval and a file that quietly dies in committee three weeks in.

Debt service coverage

The first number a lender runs. Net operating income divided by annual debt service. A result of 1.25 means the property earns twenty-five percent more than it needs to make the payment. Most stabilised commercial deals get sized to somewhere around 1.20 to 1.30, and the threshold moves with property type and with how much of the income is contractual.

Loan-to-value

Loan amount measured against appraised value. Conventional commercial mortgages commonly land in the sixty-five to seventy-five percent range, and higher leverage is achievable where the deal genuinely supports it, sometimes by layering a second piece of capital behind the senior loan rather than stretching one lender. Our note on how the LTV ratio works and why it moves covers the mechanics.

Sponsor credit and liquidity

Credit still matters, but as a signal rather than a gate. Many portfolio and private programs carry no minimum FICO requirement, and a thin or bruised file is workable when the property performs and the story is explained properly. Harder to work around is having no cash left after closing, because lenders want to see reserves. There is more on this in our piece on how credit scores affect loan approval.

Experience with the asset

A first-time buyer of a stabilised, fully-leased building is a very different risk from a first-time buyer of a half-vacant retail strip that needs re-tenanting. Lenders price inexperience; they rarely refuse it outright, and a credible property manager or partner can offset a good deal of it.

The property itself

Condition, location, tenancy and remaining lease duration all feed the decision. A building with three years of weighted-average lease term left is a harder ask than the same building at eight, even when today's rent roll looks identical.

• Two to three years of operating statements — yours, or the seller's on a purchase
• Current rent roll with lease start and end dates
• Personal financial statement and schedule of real estate owned
• Two to three years of personal and entity tax returns
• Purchase contract or a payoff statement on the existing loan
• Entity documents — operating agreement, EIN, certificate of good standing

Every lender's list runs a little longer than this one. Having these six items ready is usually enough to get real terms quoted instead of a placeholder.

There is no published rate sheet for commercial mortgages the way there is for a thirty-year fixed home loan. Pricing is assembled deal by deal, and any number quoted before a lender has seen the rent roll is a guess dressed up as a quote. What follows is what genuinely moves the number once they have.

• The underlying index. Most fixed pricing is built off a treasury or swap benchmark of matching term, plus a spread. The benchmark yields are published every business day by the Federal Reserve in its H.15 Selected Interest Rates release.
• Leverage. Every step up in LTV costs something, and the increase is rarely linear.
• Coverage. A file at 1.45x debt service coverage prices better than the same file at 1.22x.
• Property type. Multifamily and industrial generally price tighter than retail, hospitality or special-purpose.
• Lease quality. Long leases to credit tenants tighten pricing; short leases to unrated local tenants widen it.
• Recourse. Non-recourse costs more than a loan you personally guarantee, and that premium is often worth paying.
• Term and amortization. A ten-year fixed prices differently from a five, and a twenty-five-year schedule differently from a thirty.
• Prepayment structure. Yield maintenance, defeasance and step-down penalties are all priced. Flexibility costs basis points.
• Sponsor strength. Liquidity, net worth and demonstrated track record with the asset class.
• Execution certainty. A complete, well-organised package taken to the right desk simply gets better terms than the same deal shopped badly.

We deliberately do not print a rate on this page, because a rate printed today would be wrong by the time you read it. For how the market is behaving and what to watch, see our commercial mortgage rates explainer, or run your scenario through the calculator to see how the payment moves as the terms move.

Different asset classes are underwritten by different desks with different appetites, and appetite shifts quarter to quarter. Placing a deal well starts with knowing which lenders are actively writing that property type right now.

Apartment buildings of five units and up have their own programs and their own economics. Those live on our multifamily and apartment building loans page.

Most borrowers arrive assuming there is one loan and the only real question is the rate. In practice there are several distinct capital sources, and the right one depends far more on the shape of the deal than on where the rate lands.

If speed or a non-conforming story is the constraint, look at hard money and bridge loans or at portfolio lending. If a bank has already declined the file, read why a bank decline is rarely the end of the deal.

Purchase or refinance, the sequence is broadly the same. Where deals slip is almost always the gap between step three and step five, so build your timeline around third-party reports and lender conditions rather than around the term sheet date.

1. Define the deal before you shop itPurchase price or current value, the loan amount you actually need, your timeline, and whether non-recourse is a requirement or a preference. Vague requests attract vague quotes.
2. Assemble the package firstOperating statements, rent roll, personal financial statement, tax returns, entity documents. A complete package is the cheapest negotiating leverage available to you.
3. Match the deal to lenders who are actually writing itThis is where a broker earns the fee. Blasting one file to twenty lenders is not shopping, it is noise, and lenders can tell.
4. Term sheet and depositCompare structure, not only rate. Recourse, prepayment, reserve requirements, and what the lender is allowed to re-trade on later.
5. Third-party reports and underwritingAppraisal, environmental, sometimes engineering. Order early. This stage determines your closing date more than any other.
6. Clear conditions and closeTitle, insurance, entity formalities, tenant estoppels. Clean files can close in weeks; complicated ones take as long as they take.

Straightforward files have closed in fifteen days or less, though that depends heavily on how quickly appraisal and title come back. Send the deal over and we will tell you what is realistic before you commit to a contract date.

CMC works out of Yonkers, New York, and places commercial mortgages nationwide across all fifty states. The New York metro is home ground, and that matters more than it sounds. Appraisers, title practice, rent regulation and lender appetite all behave differently here than they do elsewhere, and a lender who is comfortable with a Westchester mixed-use building is not necessarily comfortable with the same building in another state.

Westchester County · Yonkers · New Rochelle · Mount Vernon · White Plains · Bronx · Manhattan · Brooklyn · Queens · Staten Island · Long Island · Nassau and Suffolk · Rockland · Northern New Jersey · Southern Connecticut

Outside the region we work the same way, through a network of more than 750 lenders and over 500,000 programs. That reach is what makes it possible to place an asset properly in a market we do not walk past every day.

Looking specifically for someone local? See commercial mortgage brokerage in Yonkers, NY, or read what a commercial mortgage broker should actually be doing for you before you sign anything.

Commercial mortgages by market. Seven guides on how local rules change the loan: NYC, where rent regulation caps the income a lender will credit; Orlando, where insurance is the line that moves the loan amount; Carrollton, Texas, where the state cap on appraised values expires on 31 December 2026; Chandler, Arizona, where a 5 percent cap on taxable value survives a sale but not a renovation; Anaheim, California, where the tax resets to the purchase price and a supplemental bill follows that the lender never sees; San Jose, where a transfer tax steps up at $5 million and older apartments take one 5 percent increase a year; and Bridgeport, Connecticut, where a 2025 revaluation cut the mill rate from 43.45 to 27.95 and the seller pays the conveyance tax.