NEW YORK CITY—Debt financing is easier to obtain and there are more sources for it than there were a few years ago, but that doesn't mean all forms of financing are equally available. Rated on a sliding scale ranging from “very easy” to “very difficult,” lines of credit scored higher on the difficulty scale than any other form of financing in this year's capital markets survey of Real Estate Forum readers.

LOCs were rated as moderately or very difficult to obtain by approximately 29% of survey respondents, compared to 22.6% of Forum readers who said this about construction financing. Conversely, just 26.3% of survey respondents said it was “easy” or “very easy” to secure an LOC, with the remaining 44.5% ranking it in the middle.

By contrast, more than 40% of respondents rated both construction financing and mezzanine financing as “easy” or “very easy” to obtain. Obtaining acquisition financing and refinancing a maturing loan were each rated on the higher end of the easiness scale by nearly 60% of readers who participated in this year's online survey.

With upwards of 80% of survey respondents agreeing on both counts, it's a safe conclusion that the availability of debt financing has increased compared to 12 months ago and that the number of debt sources has also increased compared to a year earlier. The numbers bear out the observations of Forum readers: earlier this month, the Mortgage Bankers Association reported that total commercial/multifamily debt outstanding stood at $2.64 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2014, an increase of $48.9 billion, or 1.9%, over Q3. The MBA says that commercial/multifamily debt outstanding increased at the highest rate since Q4 of 2007, as three of the four major investor groups increased their holdings in the fourth quarter.

On a year-over-year basis, the amount of mortgage debt outstanding at the end of 2014 was $119.5 billion, or 4.7%, higher than at the end of 2013. Of that tally, multifamily mortgage debt saw the largest quarter-to-quarter and Y-O-Y gains: the amount of debt outstanding rose to $964 billion, an increase of $23.7 billion, or 2.5%, from Q3, and $60.0 billion, or 6.6%, from a year earlier.

"Led by growth in loans on multifamily properties, banks, the GSEs and life insurance companies all increased their books of business by more than 5% during the year and by more than 2% during the fourth quarter alone," says Jamie Woodwell, MBA's VP of commercial real estate research. "Rising property values, improving fundamentals and low interest rates all contributed to the growth."

In terms of dollar volume, bank and thrifts saw the largest Q4 increase in their holdings of commercial/multifamily mortgage debt: $23 billion, for a Y-O-Y increase of 2.5%. REITs recorded the largest percentage increase in holdings of commercial/multifamily mortgages, at 16.5%, while private pension funds saw the biggest decrease, at 6.7%.

Read more about what Forum readers have to say about the capital markets outlook in the upcoming issue of Real Estate Forum magazine. For more information on the issue, or to participate, contact Gregg Christensen.