A wave of commercial mortgages is coming due this year. The Mortgage Bankers Association puts the number at $875 billion, or 17% of the $5.0 trillion in commercial and multifamily debt currently outstanding nationwide. That is actually a 9% drop from the $957 billion that matured in 2025, so the wall is shrinking, not growing. But a smaller wave still means thousands of owners across the country, including plenty here in Hampton Roads, are staring down a loan that will not simply roll over on the old terms. Rates are higher than when most of these loans originated. Underwriting is stricter. And increasingly, the first call an owner makes is not to their lender, it is to an appraiser.
A National Wall, a Local Decision
The $875 billion figure is national, and the mix behind it varies by property type and lender. What matters for a Hampton Roads owner is simpler: does your loan come due in 2026, and if it does, will the property support a refinance on today’s terms? A loan that closed in 2016 on a 10-year term, or one of the shorter-duration bridge and construction loans written during the 2021-2022 lending boom, is reaching that decision point right now. The property has not changed much. The debt market around it has changed enormously.
That gap between “the building looks the same” and “the financing environment does not” is exactly what pushes refinancing decisions into territory an appraisal is built to answer. Can the property’s current net operating income support a new loan amount at today’s rate? Has the as-is value moved enough to change the loan-to-value math? Is a short-term extension a better bet than a full refinance, given where cap rates are likely headed? None of those are legal or lending questions first. They are valuation questions, and that is a shift worth understanding.
The Appraiser’s Role Is Moving Earlier in the Deal
For most of the past several decades, an appraisal arrived near the end of a transaction. A buyer and seller agreed on a price, a lender issued a term sheet, and the appraisal showed up to confirm, or occasionally challenge, a number that was already largely set. Walker & Dunlop’s valuation arm, Apprise, described a different pattern emerging this year: clients are bringing appraisers in before capital is committed, to test assumptions and identify risk, rather than after a deal is already structured. As Meghan Czechowski, the firm’s head of valuation, put it, “value is no longer the finish line. It’s the starting point for understanding risk.”
That framing fits a maturity wall better than it fits a typical sale. When an owner is deciding between refinancing, negotiating a short-term extension, bringing in a recapitalization partner, or selling outright, the appraised value is not just a number for the closing table. It is the input that determines which of those options is even realistic. A property worth less than its outstanding loan balance has a very different set of choices than one with real equity left in it, and an owner who finds that out before approaching a lender is in a materially stronger negotiating position than one who finds out during underwriting.
A Sector Picture That Depends on Which Sector You’re In
This is also not a uniform story across property types, which is part of why an early, specific appraisal matters more than a general sense of “the market.” Integra Realty Resources’ Viewpoint 2026 report, built from input from nearly 600 valuation advisors nationwide, described conditions heading into this year as “uneven” rather than uniformly good or bad. Office fundamentals remain weak, with vacancy near record levels in many markets. Multifamily occupancy is rebounding as the wave of new construction from the past few years winds down. Retail vacancy sits at record lows. Industrial and hospitality are described as normalizing after a volatile few years in each direction.
Hampton Roads has its own version of each of these stories, and we have covered several of them individually in recent months. Office refinancing stress tied to CMBS delinquencies looks very different from an industrial property riding genuinely strong regional demand, even if both loans mature in the same quarter. A blanket assumption about where “the market” stands, applied to a specific property with a specific loan coming due, is one of the more common ways a refinancing plan goes sideways. The sector matters as much as the maturity date.
What This Means for a Hampton Roads Loan Coming Due This Year
If you own commercial property with debt maturing in 2026 or early 2027, the practical takeaway is timing. An appraisal commissioned the month before your loan matures tells you what your options are after most of them have already narrowed. An appraisal commissioned six to nine months out, while there is still runway to act on what it finds, tells you what your options are while you can still choose among them.
That lead time matters more in this cycle than it did a few years ago, for a straightforward reason: lenders are underwriting more conservatively than they were when many of these loans originated, and the gap between a property’s value under old assumptions and its value under current ones can be significant. A multifamily property financed in 2021 at a sub-5% cap rate assumption, for example, is being refinanced into a market where that same asset class now trades meaningfully higher. Finding out how that math actually lands, with real numbers specific to your property rather than a market average, is the entire point of getting the valuation question answered early.
Getting Ahead of Your Own Maturity Date
The owners who come out of a maturity wall in the best shape are rarely the ones who guessed right. They are the ones who found out early what their property was actually worth under current conditions, and structured their next move around that number instead of around last year’s. If you have a loan maturing in the next twelve to eighteen months, an updated appraisal is the tool that turns “I hope this refinances fine” into an actual plan, whether that plan is a straightforward refinance, a negotiated extension, or bringing in new capital. The sooner that conversation happens, the more of those options are still genuinely on the table.
