Bring out the defibrillators for commercial real estate.

The commercial real estate market is still dead — at least the part the Federal Reserve has targeted to resuscitate lending for developers and owners of office buildings, hotels and other commercial property.

It’s time for the government to come up with a faster, simpler plan to revitalize lending before “CRE” becomes the next dreaded financial acronym.

Two months after the Fed announced it would try to stoke lending in the commercial real estate sector, there are still no new deals in the commercial mortgage-backed securities market. Even interest in using the program for purchases of older bonds backed by commercial loans has been lukewarm — it didn’t even break the $1 billion mark this week.

This isn’t reassuring, given the drought of financing available for developers and owners of hotels, office buildings and other commercial property that need to refinance maturing debt.

Big banks and real estate industry lobbyists are already starting to draft proposals for the government to consider.

Here’s my two cents: Adopt a straight-forward government guarantee facility, much like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp’s program. Then make sure to earmark the funding specifically for the refinancing of commercial loans that would stand up under conventional lending standards — not those based on rosy projections common during the real estate boom.

This wouldn’t, and shouldn’t, save loans that are severely underwater thanks to bad underwriting, but it would ensure that those with good credit can get the financing they need.

A guarantee would be quicker and cleaner to implement, would make financing costs much more reasonable for qualifying borrowers and could go beyond the narrow scope of the commercial mortgage-backed securities market.

It would also help cushion the blow for regional banks that are heavily exposed to such loans, and maybe, just maybe for the likes of General Electric, which needs real estate prices to stabilize, if not rebound, to avoid taking a big hit on its $84 billion portfolio.

On Friday, GE Capital took $76 million in impairment charges in the second quarter against the portfolio. The fear is that the company will eventually be forced to realize much bigger losses if the commercial real estate market doesn’t improve.

The U.S. commercial real estate market is a $6.7 trillion behemoth supported by $3.5 trillion of debt that comes in many forms, including commercial mortgage-backed securities that house loans in tradable bonds.

The Fed, and soon Treasury through the private-public investment scheme known as PPIP, is hoping a revitalization of the relatively small $700 billion commercial mortgage bond market will have the knock-on effect of lowering interest rates and thereby making financing more affordable.

It’s had some success with consumer-related lending after its Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) helped reopen the asset-backed securities market where student loans, credit card debt and other types of consumer debt are packaged and sold.

The thing about the CMBS market, though, is it takes months to get going even under the best conditions. New deals aren’t expected to hit the market until August at the earliest. And even then, no one is expecting to see the kind of multi-billion dollar deals common during the credit boom for quite some time.

A guarantee program could get money flowing much more quickly by allowing banks to raise funds in the already open corporate bond market. Essential to the program, however, would be a mandate that the funds raised under the program could be used only for commercial real estate lending.

It’s time to consider some other options to open up the market before time runs out.