The commercial real estate business has been on a hot streak for nearly a decade now. This streak has fueled the business of developers and brokers while reshaping the downtowns and suburban areas of cities across the Midwest. But it’s also kept commercial financing pros extremely busy.
Commercial lenders say that the requests for financing, for everything from major distribution centers to luxury high-rise apartment towers to neighborhood shopping centers, keep flowing into their offices. And today, these requests usually come with good fundamentals, proving that developers and investors have learned from their past mistakes.
The best news of all? The companies providing the financing that keeps the CRE business humming say they expect to remain just as active in 2019.
“How long will we remain this busy? That’s hard to predict,” said Greg Warsek, senior vice president and senior regional manager in the Commercial Real Estate Division in the Chicago office of Associated Bank. “People keep wanting to predict that this is the peak of the cycle, that we are going to run out of steam. But there are a lot of indicators that remain awfully strong and contradict that line of thinking. We keep seeing good deals with sponsors and pre-leasing. That, to me, is a sign that there is still time left in this cycle.”
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