On Thursday, May 19, the Senate Banking Committee held a hearing on “Improving Communities’ and Businesses’ Access to Capital and Economic Development.” One of the bills discussed at the hearing was H.R. 4620, the Preserving Access to CRE Capital Act (Rep. Hill, R-AR). This bill provides important, common-sense relief from overly-broad commercial risk retention rules scheduled to go into effect on December 24, 2016. As written, the “Qualified Commercial Real Estate” (QCRE) exemption to the commercial risk retention rules only encompasses 4% of CMBS transactions, so unless modified, CMBS liquidity will be drastically reduced when the rules go into effect. This will produce a negative ripple effect throughout the secondary and tertiary commercial real estate markets that depend on CMBS for a large portion of their financing. NAR sent a letter of support for H.R. 4620 to the Committee; earlier this year the bill was approved by the House Financial Services Committee. NAR will continue to support this bill and push for its passage ahead of the December 24, 2016 deadline for the rules.