Your commercial mortgage matures in the next 12 months. Here is the playbook.

A loan maturity is not a deadline. It is a countdown that started months before most owners begin paying attention to it — and every month of it you spend waiting is an option quietly expiring.

Here is the situation a large share of owners are in right now: a loan written years ago at a rate in the 3s or 4s, coming due into a market quoting 6s and 7s. The property may be performing exactly as it always has — and still not qualify for the loan balance it currently carries, because debt service at today's rates consumes coverage that yesterday's rates never touched. That is not a distressed-owner problem. It is an arithmetic problem, and it has arrived for well-run properties everywhere.

The good news: nearly every maturity has a workable answer if the clock is used properly. The answers narrow sharply as it runs out.

First, run the numbers a lender will run

Before calling anyone, underwrite yourself the way a credit officer will. Three numbers decide almost everything:

• Coverage at today's rates. Take your actual net operating income and divide it by the annual debt service on your current balance at a current market rate. Most banks want to see 1.20x–1.25x. If you are below that, your refinance is a proceeds conversation, not a rate conversation.
• Value at today's cap rates. Your loan-to-value is measured against what an appraiser concludes this year, not what the property was worth when the loan was written. Sixty-five to seventy percent of a current value is the realistic ceiling for most bank executions.
• The gap, if there is one. If maximum supportable proceeds come in below your payoff, quantify the shortfall now. A known $800K gap twelve months out is a planning item. The same gap discovered sixty days from maturity is a crisis.

This half-day of honest arithmetic is the highest-return work in the entire process, because it tells you which of the four paths below you are actually on.

The four paths through a maturity

Path one: the clean refinance. Coverage works, value works, and the assignment is execution — running the right lenders in competition so you do not accept the first quote as the market. Banks, credit unions, life companies, CMBS, and agency lenders will each read the same property differently; the spread between the best and worst term sheet on an identical deal is routinely wider than owners expect, in proceeds, rate, prepayment flexibility, and whether the bank demands your deposit relationship as part of the price. Competition is not a courtesy to you; it is the mechanism that produces the terms.

Path two: the structured refinance. The numbers almost work. This is where structure earns its keep: an interest-only period to hold coverage, a reserve posted at closing and released on performance, a modest paydown, or a lender category whose underwriting reads your situation more generously. We recently arranged a $22MM refinance of a property whose trailing income could not tell the real story — the loan closed because a six-month payment reserve answered the lender's one genuine objection. Deals on this path get done by solving the specific objection, not by shopping harder for a lender without one.

Path three: maturity defense. The permanent numbers do not work yet — income is still recovering, a lease is still in negotiation, or rates simply need time. A bridge loan retires the maturing debt and buys twelve to thirty-six months for the story to finish, at a price. That price is worth paying when the alternative is negotiating with your current lender from a position of no alternatives, and worth refusing when the "story" is hope rather than a plan. An honest advisor will tell you which one yours is.

Path four: the capital event. Sometimes the right answer is not more debt — it is gap capital, a partial sale, a recapitalization, or simply selling into a market that values the asset more than the debt markets do. Owners resist this path longest and regret the delay most. If the property cannot carry market-rate debt at any structure, the maturity did not create that problem; it revealed it.

The clock, worked backward

Twelve to nine months out: run the self-underwriting above. Order your own broker opinion of value if the number is uncertain. Fix what is fixable — document the rent roll, clean up the T12, resolve the small deferred-maintenance items an appraiser will photograph. Pull your loan documents and read the prepayment and extension provisions you have not looked at since closing.

Nine to six months out: take the deal to market. A real process approaches multiple lender categories simultaneously with a consistent, lender-ready package — not one bank at a time, sequentially, burning three weeks per polite decline. This is also when appraisal risk gets managed: if the appraisal comes in low, you want the time to contest it with a documented reconsideration of value or to pivot lenders, and both take weeks you will not have later.

Six to three months out: term sheets in hand, negotiated against each other — proceeds, rate, amortization, recourse, reserves, prepayment, and deposit requirements compared line by line, not by rate alone. Application signed with the winner, third-party reports ordered, and a live backup lender kept warm, because a quarter of deals lose their first lender in due diligence and the ones that close anyway are the ones that had somewhere to go.

Three months to maturity: execution — diligence, legal, title, and the closing calendar. If the process only starts here, be honest about the position: the realistic menu is your incumbent lender's extension terms, a fast bridge execution, or a sale. All three improve dramatically if you engage them proactively rather than in the final thirty days.

What lenders will ask for on the first call

Every serious lender conversation begins with the same package: a trailing-twelve-month operating statement, a current rent roll, a summary of the sponsor's experience and liquidity, the existing loan terms and payoff, and a short narrative connecting the property's numbers to its story. Owners who show up with that package complete get quotes in days; owners who assemble it piecemeal over six weeks teach every lender in the market that the deal is not ready. If you want a capital markets read on your maturity — which path you are on, what proceeds the market will support, and which lenders are actually competitive for your profile — send us the full picture and we will respond with preliminary direction within two business days.

Coverage ratios, leverage levels, and rate ranges referenced reflect current market activity and recent lender quotes; actual terms vary by transaction. Nothing here is an offer or a commitment to lend.