Birmingham carries $815M of CMBS across 33 loans, a modest book by national standards, and the distress reading in the filed record is moving the wrong way — 12.9% as of July 2026 and rising. That is a status servicers have declared, not a projection, and it sits against a median DSCR of 1.96 that still reads comfortably on paper. The tension between a cushioned coverage figure and a climbing distress rate is the story here.
The near-term pressure point is 2027, when $261M comes due — 32% of the entire book landing in a single year. For now that maturity wall is clean on the filed record, but it concentrates refinancing risk into a narrow window. Retail, meanwhile, is the largest sector at $362M and carries a 0.0% distress rate, below the 2.6% national retail mark — a notable hold for a property type under scrutiny almost everywhere else.
On the ground, the signal is less benign: 22 distress events over the past year, split between 9 store closures and 13 layoff notices touching 853 jobs. Those are the real-economy tremors that precede what the servicer record eventually reflects, and in Birmingham they are running while the headline distress rate climbs.
Here is the Birmingham, AL CRE distress read:
Birmingham, AL is showing broad-based distress: 3 of 4 signals are elevated, and 3 of 6 pairwise comparisons agree on stress while another 3 point to disagreement between mechanisms. Store closures are elevated at 13 closures (3.0 per 100k jobs), and layoff notices (WARN) are elevated at 23 notices (0.3% of employment). Bank CRE over the noncurrent line is elevated at $1,120.3mm, an 8.37% rate. The securitized tape reads quiet at 4 loans in special servicing, a 13.46% rate, but the disagreement is structural: retail is failing on buildings this tape does not hold, the lenders here are stressed on a book the tape cannot see, and employers are cutting while the securitized book has not moved. No legs are blind, so all six pairs are adjudicated, with three reading elevated on both sides and none reading quiet on both.
| Signal | Level | Rate | Rank by count | Rank by rate | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| store closures store closures per 100,000 jobs |
13 closures | 3 per 100k jobs | 34 of 392 | 86 of 392 | elevated trailing 365 days to today
|
| layoff notices (WARN) workers on layoff notices as a share of the metro's employment |
23 notices | 0.3% | 28 of 386 | 72 of 386 | elevated trailing 365 days to today
|
| bank CRE at lenders over the noncurrent line share of the CRE lent into this metro that sits at a lender over the blended-noncurrent line |
$1.12bn | 8.37% | 40 of 393 | 88 of 393 | elevated
allocated 2026-03-31
|
| securitized loans in special servicing share of the securitized balance read here that is in special servicing |
4 loan records | 13.46% | 42 of 335 | 38 of 335 | quiet 2026-07-29
|
In Birmingham, AL, the elevated distress signals are bank-distressed CRE (distressed lender CRE of $1.12bn), retail closures (13 store closures over 1 year), and WARN layoffs (23 notices in 1 year). The CRE-credit stress reading is still early: bank CRE at risk at the 90th percentile is 51.3% of $13.38bn in bank CRE, while the CMBS special-servicing share of metro UPB is 13.5% ($119.0mm in special servicing). The reading on loan-count concentration is unavailable—only the UPB share is provided, not the number of CMBS loans in special servicing relative to the metro total.
| Bank | Deposit share | CRE / Capital* | Room contributed | Noncurrent CRE |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oakworth Capital Bank AL | 78.0% | 190% total 305%
|
🔒 | 0.00% |
| Metro Bank AL | 75.0% | 187% total 222%
|
🔒 | 1.66% |
| Bryant Bank AL | 29.4% | 200% total 269%
|
🔒 | 0.00% |
| River Bank & Trust AL | 15.1% | 159% total 276%
|
🔒 | 0.31% |
| First National Banker's Bank LA | 29.1% | 189% total 233%
|
🔒 | 1.00% |
| Central State Bank AL | 96.4% | 233% total 373%
|
🔒 | 0.00% |
| Evabank AL | 16.5% | 116% total 213%
|
🔒 | 0.35% |
| Peoples Bank Of Alabama AL | 25.0% | 215% total 299%
|
🔒 | 0.56% |
| Firstbank TN | 5.0% | 269% total 386%
|
🔒 | 0.97% |
| First Us Bank AL | 42.5% | 249% total 296%
|
🔒 | 0.09% |
| Citizens Trust Bank GA | 11.5% | 110% total 177%
|
🔒 | 1.62% |
| Trustmark Bank MS | 1.5% | 237% total 298%
|
🔒 | 0.17% |
| Community Bank Of Mississippi MS | 3.5% | 202% total 310%
|
🔒 | 0.06% |
| Union State Bank AL | 73.2% | 227% total 312%
|
🔒 | 0.74% |
| Cb&s Bank, Inc. AL | 2.9% | 204% total 267%
|
🔒 | 0.94% |
| West Alabama Bank & Trust AL | 5.1% | 151% total 248%
|
🔒 | 0.11% |
| Marion Community Bank AL | 25.1% | 228% total 356%
|
🔒 | 2.39% |
| First Bank Of Alabama AL | 5.1% | 244% total 327%
|
🔒 | 4.32% |
| Noblebank & Trust AL | 9.3% | 230% total 329%
|
🔒 | 0.00% |
| Bankfirst Financial Services MS | 1.1% | 219% total 317%
|
🔒 | 0.32% |
| Robertson Banking Company AL | 10.5% | 255% total 330%
|
🔒 | 0.01% |
| Peoples Independent Bank AL | 4.1% | 182% total 230%
|
🔒 | 0.00% |
| Smartbank TN | 2.7% | 290% total 461%
|
🔒 | 0.10% |
| Millennial Bank AL | 100.0% | 299% total 516%
|
🔒 | 0.00% |
| Southpoint Bank AL | 59.8% | 350% total 534%
|
🔒 | 3.10% |
| Bank | Total CRE | CRE / Capital* | Noncurrent CRE | Early Warning |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Hometown Bank Of Alabama | $59M | 53% total 75%
|
4.75% | 🔒 |
| Southpoint Bank | $577M | 350% total 534%
|
3.10% | 🔒 |
| First Financial Bank | $69M | 88% total 250%
|
2.61% | 🔒 |
| Metro Bank | $389M | 187% total 222%
|
1.66% | 🔒 |
| Servisfirst Bank | $9.4B | 307% total 429%
|
1.45% | 🔒 |
| Regions Bank | $16.3B | 65% total 97%
|
1.14% | 🔒 |
| Union State Bank | $66M | 227% total 312%
|
0.74% | 🔒 |
| First Us Bank | $340M | 249% total 296%
|
0.09% | 🔒 |
Birmingham's banks appear to have adequate capacity to absorb the metro's visible CMBS maturities: against $323.3mm of maturing balances across 9 maturing loans, qualifying regional and community banks show $859.8mm of room before committed draws and $521.0mm after committed draws, giving a wall-to-room ratio of 0.62 (or 0.38 on the pre-committed-draws basis) — a "slack" reading that places the metro 77 of 275 counting from the most strained, with 25 banks qualifying versus 9 banks excluded here. Two caveats temper that: the wall is CMBS only, so the ratio is an upper bound on how much of the maturity load local banks would have to absorb, and room is a proxy based on deposit footprint rather than a measurement of lending footprint; the distressed share of 14.6% and the $815.2mm CMBS UPB describe the backdrop but no further breakdown of either is available in these figures.
| REIT | SS NOI | SS Revenue | Occupancy | Rent | As Of |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MAA | -0.1% | +0.8% | 95.2% | +1.9% | 2026-07-29 |
Over the trailing 365-day window, approved store closures in Birmingham, AL total 9, alongside 13 WARN notices affecting 853 jobs — a figure that is a floor, since notices stating no headcount are counted but contribute no jobs. CRE-likely bankruptcy filings stand at 0, though this is a state proxy rather than a metro-native count.