“It just hasn’t been a big problem to date,” Bill Hughes, SVP and managing director of Marcus & Millichap Capital Corp., says of the controversy surrounding Libor these past several months. At bottom, he explains, Libor is just an index, something to measure rates against. “It is the all in rate that is important.”

To be sure, other industries are more sensitive to its fluctuations, starting with, ironically, the banking industry. In the real estate industry, though, a few basis points one way or another will not impact a deal because spreads adjust, Hughes says. One of the reforms suggested is the creation of a new group of banks to give input to the rate, but ultimately, Hughes says, it will amount to the same structure.

Not that a reset of Libor will be completely business as usual. There are almost always unintended consequences to a change in regulation, Hughes says. “A little additional scrutiny is probably a good thing but a lot is not.” One possibility is that the “new” Libor could raise borrowing costs for banks, which could be passed onto borrowers. Again, in the case of the commercial real estate industry, that impact will be negligible, Hughes says. “Banks will always compete for business and they compete by adjusting their spread. That's what borrowers care about.”

Still, though, banks are facing a number of pressures, not the least of which is the ongoing Eurozone crisis, new credit- and risk-retention rules under Basel III and the possibility of the US going over the fiscal cliff. So far, it looks as though on the margins, Libor’s rate manipulation cuts into lenders’ returns, says Chandan—thus curtailing the availability of financing to some degree. If that were to continue, along with these other pressures, borrowers could start to feel a cause-and-effect.