A year ago, most owners facing looming maturities were still clinging to "extend and pretend." Today, the story is different: record‑competitive debt is not only cushioning those maturities, but it is also starting to pry assets loose and pull the next leg of the transactions cycle forward, even as sales volumes remain well below their prior peak.
Debt Surges Ahead Of Sales
JLL's latest Global Bid Intensity Index and Global Credit Intensity Index show a market that is moving out of neutral, but the two sides of the capital stack are not advancing in lockstep.
"It's really right now that debt markets that are so very strong," Lauro Ferroni, head of U.S. capital markets research at JLL, tells GlobeSt.com. "The investment sales market — while it is up on the trough levels, and activity grew in 2024, it grew in 2025, it has continued to grow and actually accelerate in year‑to‑date in 2026. But we are still below those peak levels."
That disconnect is visible in JLL's credit intensity index, which tracks the number of lenders quoting on loan opportunities and the average loan‑to‑value ratio for winning bank financing.
"Competitiveness in the debt markets actually has surpassed where we were at the overall market peak in 2021," Ferroni says. The metric combines "the number of lenders who are actively quoting, and then it's also the intensity of what they're doing."
The result, Ferroni notes, is a more crowded lending landscape — and more aggressive — than at any point since JLL began measuring the trend in 2019.
"Borrowers have more options," he says. "Just about every lender type is active." With lenders "continuing to compete to essentially be able to deploy capital," that competition "keeps a bit of a lid on borrowing costs" even as the broader rate environment remains uncertain.
From 'Extend' To 'Sell'
The strongest signal in Ferroni's comments is not just that debt is cheap and plentiful, but that it is reshaping behavior around maturities. Over the last six to 12 months, he notes, there has been a meaningful shift in the mix of loans getting done. Refinancings have dominated, given the sheer volume of loans coming due, but that is starting to change.
"That proportion of acquisition loans has started to inch up because in some cases, a loan that has been extended one or two times, right at that point, the borrower or the owner does decide to go ahead and sell the asset," Ferroni says. "In some cases, it's because they don't believe that pricing will be that much."
Owners who no longer expect a dramatic rebound in values, he suggests, are more willing to trade the hope of future upside for certainty today, especially with so many lenders ready to finance a sale.
"They kind of want to go ahead and take some chips off the table," Ferroni adds. "And they know that they're selling into a market that, again, as our data shows, is demonstrating an uptick in the number of bidders."
At the same time, those bidders are backed by "a very strong debt market, and at this time, an economy that's strong." The re‑acceleration in the jobs market is a key part of that backdrop: "The last three monthly jobs reports have been very strong. And for the first time in a year, there are now more open jobs that companies are looking to hire for."
Taken together, those factors are nudging the market out of stalemate. Pricing expectations have already begun to converge, and JLL's work on bid‑ask spreads shows negotiations are more grounded than during the worst of the downturn, even if they are not fully resolved.
In this environment, owners who have already extended once or twice are increasingly choosing a clean exit over another round of workouts, particularly where rent growth stories are straightforward and well‑documented.
Debt As A Leading Indicator
Ferroni's core message is that today's unusually strong credit intensity is not just a snapshot of borrower bargaining power — it is a leading indicator of where transaction volumes are headed next.
"We look at the uptick in the debt markets as something that's going to be driving the completion of more transactions over the next one quarter, over the next two quarters," he says. Historically, he notes, "you generally see how the debt markets and that intensity lead the overall transactions market."
That is precisely what JLL's indices are designed to capture: real‑time shifts in lender and bidder behavior rather than a backward‑looking tabulation of closed sales. The Global Bid Intensity Index tracks how competitive investment sales processes are by measuring how many distinct investors are actively bidding each month and how far the winning bid sits from the asking price.
The Global Credit Intensity Index performs the same function on the lending side, focusing on both lender participation and loan‑to‑value ratios.
For now, those indicators point to a market in which debt capital is "so very strong" and investment sales are still climbing their way back from trough levels. Ferroni is careful to note that this upswing is unfolding "even with the overall macro backdrop of some level of geopolitical uncertainty and diverging interest rates."
But his expectation is clear: as lenders keep competing to deploy capital and more owners decide they would rather sell than extend again, the current liquidity in the debt markets will translate into rising transaction volumes in the coming quarters.
For investors, that means today's highly competitive financing is not just a cyclical perk — it is the mechanism pulling the next leg of the deals market forward. Those who can pair that financing with clean stories, credible underwriting and a willingness to move before sales volumes fully normalize are the most likely to benefit from this early‑mover window.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.