By Eliot Brown and Al Yoon |The Wall Street Journal
When interest rates shot up last spring over fears that the Federal Reserve would soon curtail its stimulus programs, many in the property sector believed the then-booming market for commercial mortgages would be derailed.
Not so much.
Although the market slowed temporarily when rates began rising, it bounced back quickly. Wall Street is on pace now to package and sell to investors as much as $90 billion in U.S. commercial mortgage-backed securities this year—nearly double the $48.4 billion issued in 2012 and the largest amount since 2007. CMBS issuance has remained robust despite mortgage rates that are as much as one percentage point higher than they were in the early spring.
