CMBS (Occupancy & Income Statement Data) FAQs

1. When will data be refreshed?

CMBS data has a built-in lag, so a few months of delay is completely normal and not a sign of an error.

CMBS data travels through a four-step chain before it reaches TractIQ - the property owner submits to the loan servicer, the servicer normalizes and processes it, a certificate administrator publishes it, and then CredIQ ingests it before passing it to us. Each handoff takes time. The borrower typically submits quarterly (30-60 days after quarter end), and the servicer processing step alone takes another one to two months on top of that.

So from the time conditions actually change at a property to the time you see updated data in TractIQ, so typically it will take 1 to 6 months for data to appear in TractIQ after reporting. It can be longer for borrowers who report annually rather than quarterly and if the data type (like Financials) are reported annually rather than monthly or quarterly.

If the most recent data for a facility is a few months old, that's just how CMBS reporting works - not a gap in our coverage.

 

2. Why are there gaps in the data? 

2 a. Short Gaps/Inconsistent Schedule

Most CMBS loans only require occupancy to be reported quarterly, but some require it monthly (usually loans that are on a watchlist or in some form of active monitoring). When you see monthly data for a stretch and then a gap, it often just means the loan shifted from one cadence to the other - not that something went wrong.

 

A few other things that can cause gaps:

Late or missed submissions. Borrowers have a grace period before a late report becomes a real issue. If they skip a quarter, that as-of date just doesn't exist - there's nothing for us to show.

Servicer transitions. When a loan changes hands between servicers, there's often a window where nobody is actively collecting data. This shows up as a gap in the as-of dates.

Loan modifications. During an active workout the reporting cycle can get disrupted while loan terms are being renegotiated.

The key thing to keep in mind is that these gaps reflect actual periods where occupancy wasn't reported - not periods where we're missing data that exists somewhere else. If you see a gap and want to understand why, checking whether the loan status changed around that time (i.e. moved to special servicing, was modified, etc.) will usually explain it.

 

2 b. Long/multi-year gaps

A gap that long almost always means there were two separate loans on the facility - and the period in between is just a gap between them, not missing data from a single loan.

The most common scenario: the original CMBS loan got paid off (either the facility sold, the loan matured, or the owner refinanced out of CMBS into a conventional loan) and then at some later point the facility ended up in a new CMBS deal. We show data from both loans, but the gap in between is simply a period where no CMBS loan was active - so there was nothing to report.

A couple of other things can cause long gaps too:

Defeasance. This is when a borrower pays off a CMBS loan early by substituting the property collateral with treasury securities. Once this happens, the property is released from the loan and occupancy reporting stops entirely - even though the loan technically stays alive on paper until maturity. Depending on timing, this can create a gap of a year or more before a new loan shows up.

Foreclosure and REO. When a property goes through foreclosure and the trust takes ownership, the borrower stops reporting well before the process completes - and the new reporting under trust ownership can take a long time to get established. Foreclosures in CMBS can drag on for 1-3 years in some cases.

What’s included in other income?

Other Income captures revenue that doesn't fit neatly into base rent - basically anything a facility earns outside of its core storage rental income. For self-storage, that typically includes:

• Application fees
• Box and lock sales
• Vending income
• Parking income
• Temporary tenant fees
• Forfeited security deposits
• NSF fees
• Miscellaneous income

A couple items worth noting: bad debt and insurance proceeds can sometimes show up here as adjustments depending on how the servicer normalizes them, which is part of why Other Income can look inconsistent across facilities.

Also worth knowing: parking is a good example of a line item that sometimes gets its own category and sometimes gets rolled into Other Income - so if you're comparing two facilities and one has noticeably higher Other Income, that's a likely explanation.

For the full breakdown of every line item and how it gets categorized, see the Financial Specs reference doc.