Commercial real estate loan rates, from the benchmarks up

What is a commercial real estate loan actually priced over?

A commercial real estate loan is quoted as a benchmark index plus a spread, and the two halves behave differently. The index is public, identical for every borrower, and moves every business day with the market. The spread is set by the lender from leverage, debt coverage, asset quality, market and sponsor, and it moves when lenders compete for the same file. A quote that does not name its index cannot be compared to one that does.

Take any ten-year fixed quote and subtract the ten-year Treasury’s close on the day it was quoted: what is left, in basis points, is the spread — and the spread, not the Treasury, is the part a second quote on the same deal can change. Two lenders looking at one file usually differ in the spread, not the index, which is why the benchmark is the first number to read and the last one to argue about.

Which benchmark does each loan type follow?

Most of the confusion in comparing quotes comes from comparing loans priced over different indices. The pairings below are the usual ones; a lender’s term sheet names the actual index for that program, and that line is the one to check first.

• Floating-rate bridge, construction and transitional loans price over a SOFR average — most often the thirty-day — with a rate cap purchased alongside.
• Fixed-rate bank, life-company and CMBS loans price over the Treasury tenor closest to the loan term — five, seven or ten years.
• Agency multifamily executions price off the ten-year Treasury for standard terms, with the spread set by leverage and coverage.
• Small-balance and relationship bank loans often float over Prime, or fix over the five-year Treasury.
• The Fed funds target and effective rate are the policy path every short-term index follows; five-year TIPS give the real-yield reference for inflation-linked underwriting.

How should you read the board on this page?

Each tile shows the latest observation the feed holds for one series, its FRED series id, and — for a live print — the observation date: the date the value represents, as FRED records it, not the date it was published and not the moment the page loaded. Series differ in cadence — most print each business day, while the Fed funds target is recorded for every calendar day and moves only when the Federal Open Market Committee acts — so a value dated a day or two back is the current print for that series, not a stale one. A tile marked Live came from the feed on this visit; a tile marked Fallback is a cached figure shown only when the feed cannot be reached, it carries no observation date, and it is labelled so that it is never mistaken for a live print.

The trend chart plots the dated observations the feed actually holds for the ten-year Treasury, and its title states the window those observations cover. The period low and high are the true extremes of that window. Nothing on the board is modelled, smoothed or illustrative.

Where do these numbers come from, and how are they updated?

Every series is fetched from FRED, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s economic database, by a scheduled job that runs on business days and stores the newest observation FRED holds for each series; when a new observation appears depends on that series’ own frequency and release calendar, not on the job. The board reads that store; the machine-readable feed linked above serves the same rows as JSON, newest first, so a spreadsheet or a model can read exactly what the page shows. YieldStack republishes this data with attribution under FRED’s published terms of use (fred.stlouisfed.org/legal) and is not affiliated with the Federal Reserve System or the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which bears no responsibility for this republication.

The board shows overnight SOFR and the averages the Federal Reserve Bank of New York publishes, all of which are public. The forward-looking term SOFR rates some floating quotes reference are a proprietary benchmark, not freely redistributable, and are not shown here; when a term sheet names one, read the spread against it, not against the overnight print.

To cite a value from this page: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRED series [id], observation dated [date], as republished at yieldstack.ai/rates.

How does a benchmark turn into an actual quote?

The benchmark tells you the market’s half of any quote; the spread is decided by which lenders see the deal and whether they are competing for it. One submission is screened against 5,000+ loan programs and most deals return 5–8 matches, so the spreads you compare are set by competition rather than by one desk’s appetite. It is $0 upfront; the fee is 0.50–1.00% of the loan amount, paid only at closing.

YieldStack is a commercial mortgage brokerage, not a lender. The rate, the leverage and the credit decision belong to the lenders quoting the deal; this page exists so that when a quote arrives, you can see at once how much of it is the market and how much of it is the lender.