A third of the loans used to finance Washington area commercial buildings and then sold to Wall Street are coming due in the next five years, leaving investors scrambling to find new funding. If owners can't refinance their loans, they could be forced to sell at a time when their properties are worth less. They could lose money and be forced to lay off workers.
About $21 billion of these loans must be refinanced by the end of 2013, according to data from Real Capital Analytics, a real estate research firm in New York that tracks 4,284 commercial loans.