CRE Investment Accelerates As Larger Deals Drive The Market Article originally posted on Globe St. on August 27, 2026 The commercial real estate investment market is recovering, but the rebound is not showing up evenly across the numbers. Investors put substantially more capital to work in the second quarter even as the number of properties changing hands remained below year-ago levels, a divergence that points to a market being driven increasingly by larger transactions and rising pricing rather than a broad surge in dealmaking. Altus Group’s Q2 2026 US CRE Investment & Transactions Quarterly Report found that single-property transaction count increased 6.7% from the first quarter but remained 1.2% below a year earlier. Dollar volume, by contrast, climbed 11.3% quarter over quarter and 9.4% year over year. Square footage traded rose 10.3% and 4.4%, respectively. The longer-term figures make the distinction even clearer. Over the trailing four quarters, transaction count was up 6% from a year earlier, while dollar volume increased 16.3% and square footage rose 12%. For investors, that combination matters. The market is becoming more liquid, but the amount of capital moving through it is recovering considerably faster than the number of properties being sold. At the same time, pricing is rising across most property types. Taken together, Altus Group’s data suggest the investment market has moved beyond the earliest stage of recovery, when improving conditions are visible mainly through transaction counts. Capital is now moving into larger deals and, in many sectors, doing so at higher prices. More Capital Is Chasing Fewer Deals The quarter-over-quarter improvement in transaction count was broad. Office transactions increased 9.9%, retail 9.3%, hospitality 8.8%, multifamily 7.1% and industrial 5.1%. Commercial General, which includes mixed-use properties, was the exception, with transactions declining 4%. Year-over-year comparisons were less impressive. Hospitality transactions increased 5.7% and industrial edged up 0.3%, but Commercial General fell 5.3%, multifamily declined 3%, office was down 1.7% and retail slipped 0.3%. Dollar volume tells a much stronger story. Commercial General volume surged 52.4% year over year and 25.7% from the first quarter. Industrial rose 26% annually and 22.2% quarterly, while office volume increased 18.9% from a year earlier and 11.7% sequentially. Even retail, where the number of transactions was essentially flat from a year ago, posted a 9% increase in dollar volume. Multifamily stood apart. Its dollar volume fell 11.9% year over year despite a 3.8% quarterly increase. That was accompanied by a 12.5% annual decline in square footage traded. The disconnect between deal count and dollar volume is one of the report’s most important findings. It indicates that aggregate investment volume is no longer dependent solely on getting more properties across the closing table. Larger assets and larger transactions are accounting for more of the capital being deployed. That pattern is particularly striking in Commercial General and mixed-use properties. Altus Group found that the share of transaction value coming from deals above $10 million increased 24.1 percentage points from a year earlier and 13.7 percentage points from the first quarter, the largest shift among the sectors covered by the report. The sector’s chart on page 21 puts the share of value from transactions above $10 million at 53.2% in the second quarter. That helps explain how the sector could record fewer transactions while producing a dramatic increase in dollar volume. The composition of the market changed. Pricing Is Rising With Investment Volume The increase in capital deployment is also occurring alongside higher transaction pricing. Across all property types, median pricing reached $131 per square foot in the second quarter, up from $128 in the first quarter and $121 a year earlier. That represents a 2.3% quarterly increase and an 8.6% annual gain. Industrial recorded the strongest annual increase among the major sectors. Median pricing rose 13.2% to $113 per square foot. Warehouse and distribution properties increased 15.2% to $121 per square foot, while storage jumped 24% to $93. Manufacturing rose 10.7% annually and 7.3% just from the first quarter. Commercial General and mixed-use pricing was also strong, increasing 11.6% year over year to $106 per square foot. Multifamily reached $151, up 7.4%, while retail increased 7.6% to $142. Office pricing was unchanged from the first quarter at $135 per square foot but still stood 4.9% above its year-earlier level. Hospitality was the outlier. Median pricing fell 3.4% from the first quarter and 2% from a year earlier to $134 per square foot. Full-service hotels performed worse, with pricing down 5% sequentially and 3.8% annually to $139. The pricing figures make the rise in transaction volume more consequential for investors. Dollar volume can increase simply because larger properties happen to trade. Here, however, the data show larger capital flows occurring alongside widespread increases in median price per square foot. That suggests the recovery is not confined to transaction activity; values implied by completed transactions are also moving higher across much of the market. Industrial offers perhaps the clearest example. Altus Group found that the sector’s median deal size has increased 81% since 2020, more than three times multifamily’s 23.8% increase. The industrial charts on page 17 show a median single-property transaction value of $1.9 million in Q2 and a median transacted property size of 16,480 square feet. Deals above $10 million accounted for 60.2% of sector transaction value. Industrial therefore combines three trends investors typically want to distinguish from one another: more capital is trading, pricing is higher and larger transactions are taking a substantial share of investment volume. Office Is Showing Signs Of Liquidity Returning Perhaps the more surprising evidence of improving liquidity comes from office. Office transaction count was still 1.7% below its year-earlier level, but it rose 9.9% from the first quarter. More important, dollar volume increased 18.9% year over year, while square footage traded jumped 19.9%, the strongest annual increase among the sectors in Altus Group’s quarterly square-footage comparison. The trend also holds over a longer period. Trailing four-quarter office transaction count increased 6.9% year over year. Trailing dollar volume rose 16.3%, and square footage traded increased 18.8%. That does not mean the office market’s broader challenges have disappeared. The report does not address leasing fundamentals, vacancies or refinancing conditions, and its transaction data should not be used to draw conclusions about those issues. What it does show is that more office real estate is coming to market. The composition of those trades is notable as well. The page 18 office charts show a median transaction value of $1.7 million and median property size of 10,968 square feet. Transactions above $10 million represented 64.4% of office transaction value. Median office pricing also remained 4.9% higher than a year ago. But the subtype numbers show why investors still need to distinguish between different parts of the sector. Other office pricing rose 6.1% annually to $129 per square foot, while medical office was essentially flat at $191, up just 0.7% from a year earlier and down 2.7% from the first quarter. The takeaway is narrower than an office recovery call but still meaningful. More assets are finding buyers, considerably more square footage is changing hands and dollar volume is rising faster than transaction count. That is evidence of a functioning price-discovery process and improving transaction liquidity. Investors Are Buying A Different Mix Of Assets The sector-level charts also show that the recovery is changing what gets bought, not simply how much gets bought. Multifamily provides the clearest contrast with industrial. Its median single-property transaction value was $1.7 million in the second quarter, while the median property traded measured 9,468 square feet. The share of transaction value generated by deals above $10 million stood at 61.7%. But Altus Group found that multifamily had the smallest increase in median deal size since 2020, at 23.8%. Its median transacted building size increased only 2.5% from a year ago, also the weakest performance among the major sectors. Meanwhile, the median age of multifamily properties sold increased by two years from a year earlier and one year from the first quarter. Those trends suggest multifamily’s investment market is recovering differently from industrial. Pricing is higher, but the sector is not seeing the same expansion in deal size, and the properties being sold are getting older. Combined with the decline in annual dollar volume and square footage, the data point to a more selective market rather than a broad acceleration in capital deployment. Hospitality presents another variation. Its median transaction value reached $4.4 million and its median transacted building size was 36,182 square feet, by far larger than the medians shown for the other sectors. Deals above $10 million accounted for 67.1% of transaction value. Yet hospitality was the only major sector where median price per square foot declined year over year. Retail sits at the opposite end of the large-deal spectrum. Its median transaction value was $1.6 million, and transactions above $10 million accounted for 37.7% of value. Still, trailing four-quarter retail dollar volume increased 23.7% year over year, the strongest gain among the sectors in Altus Group’s comparison. The broader message from the report is that a single transaction-volume figure no longer captures what is happening in the market. Deal count is recovering gradually, but dollars and square footage are moving faster. Pricing is rising in nearly every major property sector, while larger transactions are becoming more important in parts of the market. That makes Q2 less a story of a uniform CRE rebound than one of capital becoming more willing to transact at scale. Industrial continues to command strong pricing and larger deal sizes. Office is showing materially better liquidity. Commercial General and mixed-use investment has shifted sharply toward larger transactions. Multifamily is participating in the pricing recovery but lagging in capital and square-footage growth. Altus Group cautions that its Q2 figures are preliminary and may be revised as transactions are recorded and estimates are adjusted. The report covers non-distressed transactions and draws its property and transaction data from the company’s Reonomy dataset. Even with that qualification, the direction of the data is difficult to miss. CRE investment activity is no longer improving on just one measure. More capital is moving, more space is trading and prices are generally rising. The next test for the market will be whether transaction counts can catch up with those gains, turning what is now a recovery led by dollars and larger deals into a broader expansion in liquidity.