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.
On the record
What we checked ourselves, and where you can check it too.
- Public recordCRED iQ's own bank-data study, published two weeks before the CLO note, puts bank multifamily delinquency at 1.47% in Q1 2026 on a $665.3 billion balance, the joint-highest reading of this cycle and seven times the 0.21% pandemic-era low in Q3 2019. The same sample carries $7.12 billion 90+ days past due or on nonaccrual.View the record on cred-iq.com