"The borrowing community is aging," Cohen told Tuesday's Real Estate Investment Association program. "When was the last time you saw a 30ish developer starting out in the business? There aren't enough of them."

One solution, Cohen suggests, is 45-plus professionals taking younger charges under their wing, but he claims that isn't happening in sufficient numbers. "The older members of the community aren't good mentors," he says. "I worry about that."

On a dollars-and-sense level, the 20-year real estate veteran also is concerned about an uptick in delinquencies and defaults as the capital and real markets top out. "They don't happen by appointment," he notes. "They happen by triage." The danger grows as an increasing amount of capital chases the same amount, or fewer, deals.

"The old-timers were good about their work-outs," says Cohen, adding a view he says is shared in the capital markets. "The second generation is not."

The old school mentality, Cohen adds, was that if a borrower doubted his ability to pay back the debt, they didn't take it. Not so, today, he claims.

Other storm clouds Cohen sees include high-interest mezzanine financing. "If we're at the top of the cycles, too many things can go wrong and not enough things can go right to that position," he says.

However, borrowers can find more choices for their capital at a lower cost. "It's going to get cheaper and cheaper to access capital," Cohen says.

For companies like his, that means lower costs, perhaps through out-sourcing some functions and working with less in-house staff. "The key to life is not the lowest cost of capital," Cohen maintains. "The key to life is the lowest cost of origination."

Meanwhile, insurance companies, especially those who have converted from mutual to stock ownership, are entering the lending arena in search of greater return on their equity, Cohen says. Not that banks are going away any time soon, he believes, as they have a solid infrastructure in place. "In my view, that's where the securitized lenders will end up," he believes.

The one constant, according to Cohen, is change. "If you look back four years ago, the industry is very different today," he says. "If you look forward four years, you won't recognize it."