Paul Schmidt is a veteran of the commercial finance business. And as executive vice president and head of commercial real estate in the Milwaukee office of Associated Bank, he knows the market in the Midwest.

What does he see today? Financing requests remain steady, meaning that commercial real estate activity is the same. But the business isn’t quite as busy as it was just a year or two ago.

And when it comes to the financing requests Associated Bank sees? To no one’s surprise, multifamily and industrial are leading the way.

Financing requests remain steady: I wouldn’t classify the pace of financing requests we are receiving as particularly strong in comparison to recent years. It has been steady. It’s just not as strong as it was a year or two years ago. I don’t know exactly why that is.

You can speculate, of course. There has been some caution on the part of our customers. There had been quite a boom in terms of new apartment buildings being built. A lot of that new building stock has already been developed. There aren’t quite as many opportunities as there were when there was all that pent-up demand out there.