Veteran investors, issuers, and lawyers are eyeing US regional banks between $10bn to $100bn in assets, looking for structured solutions to address their commercial real estate (CRE) concentration.

SRT or CRT deals could help, but face challenges, pushing banks to look at other ways to move CRE exposures off-balance sheet — such as selling CRE loans and buying back related CMBS debt.

“It is a bit more difficult to use CRT as a tool for CRE because there hasn't been a lot in the space to make people comfortable with the structure,” said Matthew Bisanz, partner at Mayer Brown. “If you were to do one, it would be fairly novel and might need to use a slightly different structure.”