(Save the date: RealShare Apartments comes to the Westin Bonaventure, Los Angeles, October 24.)

BETHESDA, MD-In what must be one of the fastest turnarounds by a public company, Walker & Dunlop closed this week on its $234-million acquisition of CWCapital first announced earlier this year. The deal is a major coup for Walker & Dunlop, increasing its scale considerably and pushing it by several notches up the league table.

And it is good news for its borrowers, CEO Willy Walker tells GlobeSt.com: “The scale we've gained from this and moving up in the league tables makes us a more significant partner to the GSEs and to partners like life insurance companies and the Wall Street conduits. Now, there's a good chance our deal might be a little bit better” than a competitor’s.

Although a tenuous lending market can lead to consolidation concerns on the part of borrowers, such concerns seem not to apply here. “On one hand, bigger is better because they have more capacity, larger balance sheets, they can do more,” Bill Hughes, SVP and managing director of Marcus & Millichap Capital Corp., explains. On the other, he tells GlobeSt.com, bigger is not better “because there tends to be a narrowing lending philosophy in the market, fewer lenders, and that will leave some properties out in the cold.”

Going strictly by the numbers--and the non-reaction to the acquisition by the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission—this particular acquisition will not have that kind of impact. CWCapital did $7.7 billion in financing last year in what is a $3.1 trillion commercial real estate debt market, Walker says. “There is nothing here that says borrowers can’t find good competitive sources of capital elsewhere.”

Hughes agrees. “This one consolidation is a neutral in terms of the big picture. There isn’t that great of a distance between these two companies’ lending philosophy. ”

It is the big big picture that Hughes has his eye on right now. “If I saw a continuation of GSE lenders consolidating, especially as the GSEs come out of conservatorship and as Congress deals with their dismantling--then yes, I would worry about the amount of debt flowing into the CRE market.” As uncertainty around the GSEs’ fate grows, Hughes says, there will be fewer lenders willing to deal with it. At that point, consolidation—if it continues—could hurt.

Given Washington’s dysfunction that scenario is far off. In the immediate term, the acquisition does offer some clear benefits to CWCapital and Walker & Dunlop’s customer base. Walker says the additional scale will translate into better service and more product availability. “If you were a CWCapital borrower you didn’t have access to interim or bridge funding. Now you do.”

It will also lead to better pricing, he says—although he can’t quantify by how much. “No one could quantify it, it would be impossible,” Walker says. “If you're putting a deal together and putting pricing together and competing with someone else you don’t have know if you have gotten preferential pricing. The market evolves every day and there are so many moving parts to a deal no one could say a particular deal was significantly enhanced by Walker & Dunlop being the number one DUS lender in the country.”