Shafiq Hirani warns commercial real-estate owners not to wait for rates to drop before refinancing. Instead, start 18 months before maturity: run lender-style numbers, identify income gaps, clean up documentation, and engage multiple lenders by six months out. Owners who wait lose negotiating power and options.
If your loan is coming due and you have been waiting for rates to come down before you do anything, I have a solution. And I want to be direct with you. Waiting is not a strategy. It is a hope with a deadline attached. I'm Shafiq Hirani, MBA, CCIM. I have watched a lot of owners try to time this market. I have not seen many succeed, but I have seen plenty succeed by being ready regardless of what rates did. Like and subscribe if this is useful. Here we go. Here is the trap. An owner has a loan maturing in 18 months. Rates feel high. So the plan becomes, wait and hope they come down before I have to move. 2 things go wrong with that. First, nobody knows where rates go. Not me, not your lender, not the economists. Second, and this is the one that actually hurts, while you wait, your deadline gets closer. And your negotiating position gets weaker every month. Now think back to what actually sizes your loan. Your income divided by the coverage requirement converted at the rate. You do not control the rate. You do control the income. And you control how well it is documented. Remember the gap from the very first video in this series? That building lost about $900,000 in proceeds and none of it was because of the rate. All of it was the difference between the owner's income and the lender's. That is the piece you can actually move. So here's the timeline I would work to. 18 months out, run your own numbers the way a lender will. Find your gap. This is the highest value month in the whole process and almost nobody uses it. 12 months out, fix what you found. Explain the irregular numbers. Clean up the documentation. If there is income you can legitimately defend, That you have not been capturing, capture it now so it shows in the trailing 12. 6 months out, assemble the package. Talk to more than one lender. 90 days out, execute. And notice, at this point you have options because you did the work when you had time. Compare that to the owner who waited for rates. At 90 days out, he is just starting. He has one lender and he takes what he is given. You cannot time the rate. You can absolutely time your preparation. The owner who is ready gets the best available outcome in whatever market shows up.
