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Key Takeaways – CRE investment sales totaled $136.6 billion in Q2 2026, up 14% year-over-year — but when MSCI adjusted individual-asset sales of $102 billion for normal seasonal patterns, the result implied a 13% decline in activity, with volume also below pre-pandemic norms on an inflation-adjusted basis. – Quarterly CRE returns — once averaging 2–4% — now generally range from just above zero to 2%, per MSCI’s Jim Costello, a level that historically does not sustain double-digit sales volume growth; the 2015–2019 Q2 average for individual-asset sales was $94.7 billion in nominal terms, which the current market marginally exceeds but trails on a real-dollar basis. – The recovery is concentrated: apartment transactions in Q2 were 59% above the pre-pandemic average, industrial was similarly elevated, and office was essentially flat — while industrial outperformed the broader MSCI property index by 775 basis points annually from 2021–2025, raising questions about whether allocators are chasing past performance
Commercial real estate investment sales grew 14% year-over-year to $136.6 billion in Q2 2026, continuing a streak of double-digit annual gains. But Jim Costello, MSCI’s chief economist for real estate research, is raising a more cautious read on that number, as reported by GlobeSt. When MSCI adjusted individual-asset sales for normal quarterly seasonal patterns, the Q2 performance implied a 13% decline in activity — a result Costello described as “a bit esoteric” but worth taking seriously.
The Seasonal Adjustment Question The gap between the headline figure and the seasonally adjusted read reflects the growing role of portfolio and entity-level transactions in quarterly totals. Large portfolio deals can add billions of dollars to a quarter’s tally without signaling that…