Yesterday’s release of meeting minutes from the Federal Open Market Committee’s July 25-26 meeting garnered plenty of headlines due to the dialogue between FOMC members suggesting a rate increase in December may not be as certain as some had initially thought.

But smaller banks were not left out of the FOMC’s discussion.

“A couple of participants expressed concern that smaller banks could be assuming significant risks in efforts to expand their CRE (commercial real estate) lending,” read the minutes. “Furthermore, a couple of participants saw, as possible sources of financial instability, the pace of increase in real estate prices in the multifamily segment and the pattern of the lending and borrowing activities of certain government-sponsored enterprises.”

The concern by some FOMC members comes in a year that many smaller banks in Massachusetts have increased their commercial real estate portfolios tremendously, citing a stronger economy.

According to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, in the first quarter of 2017, commercial real estate loan concentration at Massachusetts banks statewide was just over 250 percent.

The FDIC identifies institutions that are potentially exposed to significant CRE concentration risk as those that have loan concentrations above 300 percent.

Many banks have done well with their commercial real estate loan portfolios and are planning to expand them throughout the rest of the year.

FOMC meeting participants did, however, agree immediately following the concern about commercial real estate that the “regulatory and supervisory tools developed since the financial crisis had played an important role in fostering financial stability.”

Interest rates consumed a big part of the FOMC’s discussion, primarily because a recent decline in inflation led some participants to believe the FOMC had some flexibility as to when to raise interest rates, which are currently between 1 percent and 1.25 percent.

“They observed that the committee could afford to be patient under current circumstances in deciding when to increase the federal funds rate further and argued against additional adjustments until incoming information confirmed that the recent low readings on inflation were not likely to persist and that inflation was more clearly on a path toward the committee’s symmetric 2 percent objective over the medium term,” read the minutes.

In contrast, some other participants worried about risks associated with a labor market that had already reached full employment and that is expected to tighten further.

“They cautioned that a delay in gradually removing policy accommodation could result in an overshooting of the committee’s inflation objective that would likely be costly to reverse, or that a delay could lead to an intensification of financial stability risks or to other imbalances that might prove difficult to unwind,” read the minutes.

Most participants said they expect inflation to pick up over the next couple of years from its current low level and to stabilize around the FOMC’s 2 percent objective over the medium term.

But participants also acknowledged some likelihood that inflation might remain below 2 percent for longer than they currently expected, and several indicated that the risks to the inflation outlook could be tilted to the downside.

The meeting minutes maintained that the FOMC still intends to begin reducing its $4.5 trillion balance sheet relatively soon, “provided that the economy evolved broadly as anticipated.”