DALLAS—LNR has a loan portfolio of $245 million poised for sale. CWCapital has one priced at more than $340 million. If there was a buzz around RealShare Distressed Assets, held here on Friday, it was that special servicers are getting ready to hang the ‘For Sale’ sign on their notes, and the wave is going to be huge. RealShare is produced by ALM’s Real Estate Media Group, which also publishes Real Estate Forum and GlobeSt.com. Some 200 people were in attendance at this fourth annual event.

“Note sales move back fast to the master servicers,” commented David Bornheimer of Midland Loan Services, which reports a current portfolio of $4.7 billion. He was one of five experts on the event’s Special Servicer Power Panel, not all of whom fully embraced the success of note sales. Not so with Tom Shearer of the aforementioned CWC, who obviously attested to having “a lot of success in note sales.”

In an interview after the panel, moderator Steve Pumper, executive managing director of Transwestern, told GlobeSt.com that the coming wave of sales will be fueled largely by office. “We’ll continue to see them move increasingly into special servicing through maturity defaults,” he commented.

He added that you could expect workouts for the top-tier product and for special servicers it will be a high-growth area easily through 2013. No surprise here, but the trend isn’t being helped by the slow-as-molasses job growth, “Especially as unemployment remains above 8%. Technology and methods of work are also having their evil way on the robustness of office. “Square-foot per person is being scaled back,” Pumper said, changing the numbers not in the landlord’s favor “when they go to re-up.”

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Conference keynoter Chris Seyfarth, a partner at Ernst & Young, wondered about the approach that the likes of CWC would take. In an interview after his presentation, he wondered how they would determine best price, which obviously is their “responsibility as fiduciary. The common thinking is that such sales are better as one-offs,” and he wondered if the firm would employ some out-of-the-box approaches and sell the portfolio as a whole. Stay tuned.