NYC rent-stabilized building loans: 3,269 reach their five-year mark this year, into a rate hike and a rent freeze — and who still lends on them

24,875 active commercial mortgages in New York City, $226B of principal, sit on buildings whose owners registered rent-stabilized units on the Department of Finance tax bill. The biggest cohort was written in 2021 and 2022, at the bottom of the rate cycle, and 3,269 of those loans — $26.5B — reach their five-year mark between now and October 2027. They arrive at it three weeks after the Fed's first hike since 2023, with the 5-year Treasury above 5% for the first time since 2007, and in the first week of a two-year rent freeze. Only 277 of the 3,269 state a maturity date on the recorded instrument. The lenders who wrote them are not the lenders writing today: of 2019's top five on stabilized buildings, one has failed, one is winding its book down, and two are no longer in the top ten.

This post exists because New York's recorded mortgages can now be read against two facts the city keeps in different places: how many of a building's apartments are rent-stabilized, and whether the borrower is a co-op. Neither is a property type, and no city roll records the first one. The method is at the end, and the two filters — "Rent regulation" and "Co-ops" — sit beside the unit-count filter in every New York search. Here is what they show.

The cohort that is coming due

The record is a yearly ledger of who borrowed against stabilized buildings and when. Counting one row per recorded mortgage, on buildings with at least one registered stabilized unit, at or above our listing floor ($1M outside Manhattan, $2M in it):

Principal is shown without the handful of loans of $100M or more because they move the yearly total more than the market does: 2025's full figure is $28.0B, of which $14.1B is 54 loans, Stuyvesant Town's $3.15B among them. Counts tell the story plainly. Lending on stabilized buildings fell by 61% from 2022 to 2023, and 2025 ran at half of 2022's count.

The 2021–22 cohort matters now because New York bank multifamily paper is five-year paper. The Rent Guidelines Board's 2026 mortgage survey and every lender we have spoken to say the same thing: banks limit their rate exposure to five years, whether the note is a five-year balloon or a 30-year note whose rate resets at year five. Either way the broker's event is the fifth anniversary. Of the active loans on stabilized buildings, 7,907 ($66.0B) were recorded in 2020, 2021 or 2022. The 3,269 recorded between October 2021 and September 2022 hit that anniversary in the next twelve months, and they were written at the lowest rates of the cycle.

Three of the top five no longer exist in the form that wrote the loan. Signature's $3.17B sits with the FDIC's venture with Community Preservation Corporation, Related and Neighborhood Restore, which bought a 5% stake in $5.8B of Signature's rent-regulated loans for $171M in December 2023; as of May, 42 of its 1,018 buildings were in foreclosure. First Republic's went to JPMorgan. Investors Bank's went to Citizens. New York Community Bank's are Flagstar's, and Flagstar's filings say it is curtailing originations secured by rent-regulated property; its second-quarter release puts its New York loans on buildings at least half rent-regulated at about $8.5B, down $338M in the quarter, with an allowance of 2.87% against them.

Only 277 of the 3,269 state a maturity date on the recorded instrument, and 45 of those dates fall in the next twelve months; the rest are modelled from the five-year convention and shown as estimates. That is not a gap in our reading; it is how New York records debt. The mortgage secures the note, and the note stays in the lender's file. We read the instrument where it states a term and we model the rest, and every row says which it is.

What they are refinancing into

The Federal Open Market Committee raised the target range to 3.75–4.00% on September 16, by a vote of twelve to none, the first increase since 2023. The 5-year Treasury, which prices the five-year bank loan, closed at 4.55% on September 1, crossed 5% on September 24 and ended the month at 5.09%; the last time it closed above 5% was 2007. The New York Fed's president said on September 24 that another increase by year-end would be reasonable. Co-op underlying mortgage rate sheets that read 5.69% in July read 6.19% in September. For a loan written in late 2021 at the bottom of the cycle, the new coupon is roughly double the old one.

The rent side had already moved the other way. On June 25 the Rent Guidelines Board voted seven to one for 0% on one-year and 0% on two-year renewals for leases beginning between October 1, 2026 and September 30, 2027 — the first two-year freeze in the board's history. Six landlords sued in July; a judge allowed discovery on September 17; the freeze took effect on October 1 with the case pending. The board's own figures for the year before the vote show operating costs up 5.3% and net operating income up 6.2% across all buildings with any stabilized unit, with 9.2% of buildings running a negative NOI.

Values have already repriced. Ariel Property Advisors puts the price per unit of heavily stabilized buildings at $163,000 in 2025 against $270,000 in 2019, down about 40%, with Manhattan, Northern Manhattan and the Bronx all down 44–47%. The Furman Center's February brief on the 16,600 buildings that are 90% or more stabilized, 456,000 apartments, finds real gross income down 9% from 2019 to 2025 and median sale prices back at inflation-adjusted 2011 levels; 4% of them were on the 2025 lien-sale list. Flagstar's chief financial officer told analysts in April that a freeze would take 7–8% off net operating income over three years on collateral that is more than 70% regulated.

Put the three together — a coupon roughly double, a rent roll frozen, a value down 40% — and the arithmetic at the five-year mark is a loan that no longer fits the building. The term for what follows is a cash-in refinance: the lender offers a smaller loan than the one it retires, and the owner funds the difference at closing, sells, or hands over the keys. Most search results for the phrase describe the opposite transaction. The examples in the record are the lender's side of it: Flagstar paid Alma Realty a $4.8M discount in April to be refinanced out of a performing Crown Heights loan by Zions at $83M; OceanFirst closed its purchase of Flushing Financial in June and sold $1.3B of the $1.4B multifamily book it had just acquired, $736M of it rent-regulated collateral; PIMCO sold its rent-stabilized book at a deep discount in February 2025. Trepp's figure, as reported by Bisnow, is that delinquency on New York loans secured by pre-1974 buildings went from 3.7% in October 2023 to 11.5% in October 2025, against under 0.6% on market-rate buildings.

Who still lends

The question a broker refinancing one of the 3,269 actually has. Counting recorded mortgages on buildings with registered stabilized units, originators only, institutions grouped under one name:

Chase is the market. It wrote 993 of the 3,882 such loans recorded in the last 36 months, 26%, and its 2026 pace is ahead of its 2019 pace; it is also the lender with the most of the 2021–22 cohort to roll. Beneath it the list has thinned and changed character. Five institutions wrote 35% of the last three years' loans; 557 institutions wrote at least one, and 314 of them wrote exactly one — the long tail of credit unions, savings banks and private lenders that a broker ends up calling.

Flagstar's 79 recordings this year need a footnote. 73 of them are purchase consolidations totalling $331M, which matches the $338.5M Flagstar lent Summit Properties in March to buy the Pinnacle portfolio from its own borrower, financing the sale of buildings it already held the debt on because, as The Real Deal reported, no other bank would. Set that transaction aside and Flagstar recorded six loans on stabilized buildings in all of 2025 and six more this year. Our record still carries 3,251 active loans it originated on such buildings, $21.3B of principal — more than the $14.6B book Flagstar reported at the end of 2025, because a loan stays under the bank that wrote it in the county record when the bank sells it, as Flagstar did to Cantor Fitzgerald and Lone Star in early 2025, and because a payoff is not always followed by a recorded satisfaction. The table names originators, never holders.

Co-ops are a market of their own, and two lenders left it

A cooperative borrows as a corporation against the whole building; the shareholders hold proprietary leases. Its loan is called an underlying mortgage, it is a commercial loan in every sense that matters to a lender, and the public record has never shown who makes them. When a Habitat Magazine board forum asked in February 2025 which banks write underlying loans, the readers could name one.

The record names more. Of 4,329 active underlying mortgages on buildings the Department of Finance classes as cooperatives, $38.0B in all, the lenders of the last 36 months are:

National Cooperative Bank wrote 188 of 492, nearly four in ten, and 52 of the 137 recorded so far this year; its federal charter exempts its loans from the city's mortgage recording tax, which is a large part of its edge. Volume in the segment fell with everything else: 613 underlying mortgages were recorded in 2021, 147 in 2023, 198 in 2025.

Two names that used to be on this list are not. Investors Bank recorded 122 underlying mortgages on co-op buildings in 2021 and 36 in 2022, the year Citizens completed its acquisition; the combined institution has recorded 11 since the start of 2023, five of them this year. New York Community Bank recorded 105 in 2022, 20 in 2023, and Flagstar has recorded one since the start of 2024. Neither bank has announced that it left co-op lending. The record shows the volume, and a co-op board whose underlying mortgage was written by either of them in 2021 or 2022 is refinancing with somebody else.

How to tell whether a building is rent-stabilized, from public data

Every page that answers this question answers it for a tenant: look the address up on the DHCR list, ask for the rent history. A lender needs a count, not a yes, and the public record has one.

• The DHCR and Rent Guidelines Board building lists say whether a building had at least one registered stabilized apartment in the registration year. Yes or no, one year behind, by address.
• The Department of Finance tax bill has the number. An owner who registers stabilized units with the state pays a per-unit Housing-Rent Stabilization fee, and the unit count prints on the statement of account. It is the owner's own registration — it misses owners who never registered, it can drop to zero for a year and reappear, and the DOF total for 2025 is about 966,000 units against DHCR's slightly more than a million — but it is per building, and it is the number a lender underwrites against. JustFix scrapes every statement city-wide once a year; that count is what a Circlemark row shows as "38 stabilized".
• The DOF building class — what people call the RPAD code — is the screen, not the answer. It separates walk-ups (C) from elevator buildings (D), rentals from cooperatives (C6, C8, CC, D0, D4, DC), and dwellings with stores (S) from everything else. The rental classes are where stabilization lives: on the buildings we track, they hold 95% of registered stabilized units. But 27% of the buildings in them register none — built after 1973, under six apartments, or deregulated — and nothing in the class or the rest of the assessment roll says which. An appraiser's class list tells you where to look; the tax bill tells you what is there.
• The statutory presumption — completed before 1974, six or more apartments — is the fallback. We apply it only where nothing is registered and only in a residential building class — walk-up, elevator, dwelling-with-stores, apartment hotel or SRO; in store, institution and full-service hotel classes, buildings that pass the age test register as little as 8% of the time — count residential units only (an office building's "units" are its commercial units), never apply it to a co-op, and show the result with the same ≈ as every other estimate. A building that is neither registered nor presumed is not called market-rate, because a condominium lot or a lot with no assessor record cannot be tested at all.

On the active New York loans we list, 24,875 are on buildings with registered units and 6,104 more on buildings presumed stabilized by age, size and building class. Of the buildings with a registered count, 55% have 90% or more of their apartments stabilized, 16% between half and 90%, and 28% under half — which is why a threshold matters when two sources disagree about the size of this market. Atrium Data counts buildings at least half stabilized and finds $27.6B of lending in 2019 and $11.3B in 2025; on the same threshold, above our floors, we count 1,623 loans in 2019 and 1,011 in 2025.

How we counted

• One row per recorded mortgage, from ACRIS, on commercial parcels at or above each borough's floor ($2M in Manhattan, $1M elsewhere). A loan over several buildings is counted once. Co-op unit loans, condo units and one-to-four family houses are out; the co-op figures are underlying mortgages on the building.
• "Active" means no satisfaction, release or superseding consolidation is recorded. A loan the lender sold stays under the lender that wrote it; every table names originators, not holders.
• "Registered stabilized units" is the 2024 count from the Department of Finance statement of account, as scraped by JustFix, joined by tax lot. Condominium billing lots are skipped. "Co-op" is a DOF co-op building class (C6, C8, CC, D0, D4, DC, or H7 for a cooperatively owned apartment hotel), or a borrower filing as an owners', tenants' or apartments' corporation. "Likely" is the pre-1974, six-apartment presumption in a residential building class where nothing is registered.
• Lenders are counted as institutions, not spellings, and only where the recorded party is the lender; MERS, trustees and servicers are left out. Flagstar includes New York Community Bank's recordings under its earlier name.
• Rates, votes and policy figures are the sources' own, linked below. The 5-year Treasury series is Treasury's daily par yield curve.

A loan on a stabilized building is not a distressed loan, and a two-year freeze is not a default. But a five-year loan written in the cheapest year of the cycle, on a building whose income is capped by statute and whose value has been marked down by two fifths, is a loan whose lender is about to have a different conversation with its borrower than the one they had in 2021. That conversation is where a broker earns a fee, and the record now says which buildings it is about.