Commercial real estate was supposed to be the broken asset class. Empty offices, walk-away owners, and bank pullback dominated the headlines for two years.
Then 2025 happened. Loans on big real estate jumped 40% in a single year to roughly $706 billion, the strongest year the sector has booked since rates spiked.
That's the read from the Mortgage Bankers Association's 2025 origination summation, the trade group's annual look at lending activity across the space.
The 2025 total is a $200 billion jump from 2024's $505 billion, and a 65% climb above the 2023 floor of $429 billion. That's the kind of move that says capital markets are settling and the freeze is finally breaking.
The freeze had a clear cause. Rates spiked, prices on buildings got hard to peg, and a lot of lenders simply pulled back. In 2025, capital markets steadied, banks and other lenders started writing checks again, and demand for apartments stayed strong - the combination that lit a fire under deal flow.
Inside the MBA's survey, dedicated commercial mortgage bankers closed $606 billion of loans in their own names, up 48% from $411 billion the year before. The full $706 billion total folds in smaller and mid-sized banks that don't report into the MBA survey directly, with the MBA piecing them in from other data sources.
The MBA released the summation back in April, which is when the trade group typically publishes its full-year origination read for the prior year.
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Apartments led the rebound by a wide margin. Apartment buildings pulled in about $413 billion of total loans in 2025 - more than any other property type tracked, and roughly 60% of the $706 billion total. Of that piece, $299 billion ran through dedicated real estate lenders.
The mix was conservative. First liens, the safest spot in a loan and the part that gets paid back first if a deal goes wrong, made up 95% of the dollar volume those lenders closed.
Beyond direct lending, mortgage bankers acted as middlemen on another $440 billion in loans and brokered $332 billion in property sales over the year.
The MBA flagged that not every problem in the sector got fixed. Refinancing risk is still real, prices on some properties are still in flux, and office space in particular is still working through the post-rate-hike fallout.
That said, the $706 billion print is the biggest year the space has booked in three years, and the rebound matters in two ways for investors. More deal flow likely lies ahead for banks and brokers tied to real estate, and apartments have cemented themselves as the property type lenders trust most.
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