One factor that may drive more deal activity this year is that banks, special servicers and other lenders are eager to find solutions to troubled loans now, rather than postpone a resolution in the hope the market will improve down the road, said Scott Rechler, the chief executive and chairman of RXR Realty, which has recapitalized several properties in the last year, including the recent acquisition of 620 Avenue of the Americas.

“The first half of 2011 was very strong, with a lot of deal-making,” Mr. Rechler said, “but then several incidents, including the European debt crisis and the downgrading of the U.S. debt, made the market seem frothy. This was actually somewhat healthy because it put things back into perspective.”

As a result of these market jitters, he said, “lenders who had been waiting in the hopes that the market would improve, realized that things were still unstable and so they are more ready to resolve their loans now than in the past. Maybe not in the first quarter of this year, but by the second and third quarter I see a lot of things in the pipeline.”

Already, the number of recapitalizations has ballooned. There was $13.3 billion worth of recapitalizations nationwide in 2011, according to the research firm Real Capital Analytics, the most since the firm began tracking the number in 2001.

Another factor driving deal flow is the efforts by European banks to offload some of their American loan portfolios. In December, for example, Blackstone bought a $300 million portfolio of commercial loans backed by American properties from Eurohypo, the troubled real estate arm of Commerzbank in Germany. Other sellers include Allied Irish Banks, Bank of Ireland and Anglo Irish. American banks have also been shedding loans: In September, Bank of America sold nearly $1 billion worth of loans to several investors at a discount.

The sale of these loans can help spur deals because investors who buy these loans at a discount have more room to negotiate a payoff with the borrower, said Andrew A. Lance, a partner at the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. A loan that has an outstanding balance of $100 million, for example, may sell to an investor for $80 million, enabling the investor to settle the loan with the borrower for any price between $80 million and $100 million, resulting in a profit for the investor and a discount for the borrower. While under this situation the original lender loses out, in the case of several European banks, regulators are ordering them to increase capital and shrink their balance sheets.

Dune Real Estate Partners participated in such a deal last year when it acquired the loan on the Mark Hotel on East 77th Street from Anglo Irish, recently completing a recapitalization of the property. Dan Neidich, the chief executive of Dune Real Estate Partners, said: “There are so many players now who aren’t the natural owners of real estate — like banks and special services — that never intended to own equity and who want to exit those positions. It opens opportunities for people like ourselves, who are in the business of taking equity risk, and bringing capital into the market to restructure deals.”