Multifamily is 79.8% of the newest CRE CLO collateral
The securitized bridge bid has collapsed into one food group. If you are financing office, retail or hotel on a bridge loan, the takeout is not there.
CRED iQ pulled the loan tape on a handful of the newest CRE CLO deals, $4.68 billion across 160 loans, and found apartments make up 79.8% of the aggregate balance. Hospitality is 8.1%. Industrial is 5.2%. Office, retail and health care are each roughly 1% or less. That is not a diversified bridge market. That is one product with a rounding error attached.
Why it matters
Bridge debt is priced on its exit. For most of the last cycle a transitional loan on a value-add office floor plate or a repositioned strip center could assume a CLO warehouse would take it out. On this tape that assumption is dead. If your business plan is not apartments, you are no longer competing for a slot in a diversified pool, you are asking an issuer to break a concentration they have deliberately built. Expect that to show up as wider spreads, lower advance rates, more recourse, and shorter interest-only runway, or as no bid at all.
The numbers
The apartment loans in the sample clear at a weighted-average spread of 303 basis points over SOFR and a weighted-average coupon near 6.68%. Ninety-five percent of the collateral balance is full-term interest-only, and issuers are carrying $244 million in future funding commitments, so lenders are still underwriting unfinished business plans. New York, Florida and Texas alone are more than 43% of balance.
Now the metric pointing the other way. CRED iQ’s separate read of FDIC bank data puts multifamily delinquency at 1.47% in Q1 2026 across a $665.3 billion book, the joint-highest of this cycle and seven times the 0.21% trough in Q3 2019, with $7.12 billion already 90 or more days past due or on nonaccrual. The divergence: securitized bridge capital is concentrating into apartments at exactly the moment apartment credit performance is at a cycle worst.
What’s next
Watch whether the 303-basis-point spread holds as those bank delinquencies season. Non-apartment sponsors should stop modeling a CLO takeout and price debt funds, banks and life companies directly. Track the national market for the next issuance print.