Located just nearby the North Central Expressway in North Texas were the framed structures of incomplete buildings and vacant lots that reminded long time residents of an earlier plan for a commercial complex that never took off, leaving behind instead a grim reminder of a crippling financial crisis that suck the life out of many commercial real estate projects in the area.

Such commercial real estate failures have reverberated into many things and foremost of them were the thousand of workers who lost their jobs and the area’s reduction into a virtual ghost town that pushed down property values and denied more taxes for the local government, which resulted to fewer social services.

According to Delta Associates and Real Capital Analytics, Dallas-Fort Worth’s $4.3 billion worth of commercial mortgages came into fifth place among the nation’s major metropolitan areas stricken by commercial real estate distress, with the national level now running as high as $170 billion.

Experts said that there have been some faint signs of let up but they conceded that number would rise further as an estimated $1.4 trillion in commercial mortgages were set to mature by 2014 and most property owners were resigned to the fact that refinancing even half of such huge amount is next to impossible.

To top it all, commercial real estate law specialist Anne Saegert warned that more dangers could be brought by the inevitable loan defaults since they could easily spark more property vacancies and bank mortgage losses that could chalk up a maximum of $300 billion, as predicted by a congressional panel.

Analysts said that the whole situation did not materialize overnight as the good times seen in the early 2000s emboldened many to invest in commercial property that reached its peak in 2006, when most of the purchases stood on lenders’ money due to easy access to credit during that time.

Then the crunch happened in the following year, which immediately created a domino-effect of instigating a home mortgage crisis that led to recession, business failures and runaway unemployment rate.

All of a sudden and like many homeowners, commercial real estate owners found themselves in neck-deep mortgages and when funds proved too hard to come by, a great number of these owners, defaulted on their loans, faced foreclosures and eventually forfeited their properties to banks.

Michael Ablon of PegasusAblon Properties in Dallas had admitted that the market was over-financed and recovery from the prolonged contraction may be a remote one for now as financial institutions were holding back their guns and put off construction loans in hopes of stabilizing first the gap on market prices and the value of assets on their books.

However, the wait may not be that long for many banks as they have to face up the $900 billion commercial mortgages that they would need to settle as 55 percent of those debts were attributed to banks, according to data furnished by Foresight Analytics and Trepp.

Nevertheless, Standard & Poor said that such gloomy outlook about commercial properties debts were exaggerated, citing that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp declared that the nation’s outstanding home mortgages stood at $10.7 trillion by the first quarter of the year as compared to commercial mortgages of only $3.3 trillion.

Despite the paling comparison with the housing market in terms of debt holdings, the abandoned projects in North Texas were glaring reminders that the commercial real estate sectors were so hard hit by the giant economic hiccup that many developers in the area simply elected to move on following their tremendous losses.

As Steve Everbach, former owner of the failed Times Square complex, explained of his company’s misfortunes, “It’s just not something I want to talk about. We were a small firm. The firm has closed and we’ve moved on.”