WASHINGTON — Commercial real estate is expected to remain a drag on the U. S. economy this year and beyond.

“You do see stress in the market. We’ve seen delinquency rates increasing; we’ve seen by a whole variety of measures increased stress in the commercial real estate market,” said Jamie Woodwell, the vice president of commercial real estate research for the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Commercial real estate encompasses everything from shopping malls and storefronts to industrial parks and hotels. Delinquencies on bonds backed by pools of commercial real estate loans continue climbing to record levels.

At the end of last year, 4.9 percent of all pools of these loans — called commercial mortgage-backed securities — were delinquent. That’s a fivefold increase over the year before, Moody’s Investors Service said in a mid-January special report.

The rating agency’s “delinquency tracker” found that at year’s end, more than 8 percent of the bonds for apartment-complex mortgages and more than 9 percent of bonds for hotel mortgages were delinquent.

Even New York City isn’t immune. In one of the biggest commercial real-estate deals yet to unravel, an investor group said last Monday that it had defaulted on the debt used to finance its $5.4 billion purchase in 2006 of the huge Peter Cooper and Stuyvesant Town apartment complex in Manhattan. The 11,000-unit, 56-building property is now valued at less than half its purchase price.

“2009 saw delinquencies on all property types and in all regions surpass previous highs” in the history of the tracker, Moody’s analysts wrote. “We expect loan performance to deteriorate further in 2010 and project that the (tracker) will reach 8-9 percent by the end of 2010.”

In a note last week to investors, Fitch Ratings said that default rates on commercial mortgages could reach 12 percent by 2012. The report said U. S. insurers, which invested heavily in bonds backed by commercial mortgages, stood to lose $20 billion.

In an emerging trends report last month with consultant PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Urban Land Institute, a research center, said that respondents to its survey predicted that “commercial real estate vacancies will continue to increase and rents will decrease across all property sectors before the market hits bottom in 2010 and projects value declines of 40 percent to 50 percent off 2007 market peaks.”

In something of a silver lining, the commercial real estate sector’s problems are proving to be less of a drag on the economy than experts had expected. Fears that they would rise to the magnitude of the subprime crisis, with some analysts predicting 60-percent plus default rates, appear to be waning.

“It’s not going to be the thing that undoes the economy,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com, a forecaster in West Chester, Pa.

These problems, he said, were expected as the economy soured and were quantifiable. They didn’t sneak up on the nation as the subprime mortgage crisis did.