NEW YORK CITY-One-hundred and twenty-six CMBS loans with a balance of $962 million will come due next month, and 43% of those are already in special servicing, says Fitch Ratings. The ratings agency says special servicers oversee about 25% of the $6.1 billion of Fitch-rated loans that are due to mature by the end of this year. Most of these loans are classified as delinquent or in foreclosure.

While these statistics suggest still more trouble on the way for legacy CMBS, Moody’s Investors Service said earlier this month that its Delinquency Tracker Index saw its smallest monthly rise since February 2009. The DQT increased 18 basis points in July to 7.89%.

However, Moody’s managing director Nick Levidy says in a release, “Although the monthly increases in the DQT have trailed off since March, we do not expect this trend to continue unabated for the rest of the year. The fact that the portion of loans in special servicing exceeds by over 300 basis points the portion that have so far actually gone delinquent suggests that there are still plenty of delinquent loans in-waiting that can cause the rate to spike in any given month.”

As a case in point, the 43% of loans maturing next month have a total unpaid balance of approximately $398 million. October’s tally of loans coming due is considerably larger—about $2.1 billion, according to Fitch—and while only 34% of those loans are in special servicing, the total balance on those loans is $714 million.

Looking ahead to next year, Fitch says 2,198 fixed rate commercial loans, with a total UPB of $26.5 billion, are scheduled to mature. Of those loans, $4.7 billion, or 17.9%, are already in special servicing.

Loans scheduled to mature in 2011 have a weighted average debt service coverage ratio of 1.70 and an average weighted loan to value of 79.3%, Fitch says. One-third of the loans are secured by retail properties, 29.4% by office and 16.4% by multifamily. The ratings agency says it believes loans secured by office, retail and hotel properties are the most challenging to refinance, “with the feasibility of refinance dependant on the strength of the property cash flow and overall leverage on the property.”

By vintage, 34.7% of next year’s maturing loans are from 2001, followed by 33.7% from 2006 and 13.2% from 2007. Partly because the older-vintage loans have the advantage of a decade’s worth of amortization and partly because the newer loans carry a higher LTV, Fitch expects higher default rates among the ’06 and ’07 loans. And Realpoint notes that 83% of the loans that went into special servicing in July were from more recent vintages.

Losses from these newer loans may also be more severe. “We anticipate that the cumulative loss severity rate will continue to rise from 35.4% as more loans from the 2006-2008 vintages of CMBS are liquidated at relatively higher loss severities,” says Keith Banhazl, VP and senior analyst at Moody’s, in a release. He cites “lax underwriting standards, the absence of amortization and other loan structural features, historically low capitalization rates, current reduced market liquidity and the general impact of the economic downturn” as factors that likely will cause higher loss severities.