Commercial real estate today: An overview

OUR primer on commercial real estate (CRE) investing explored the core components of real estate investing decisions. But what about CRE investing in the current environment? How has the post-pandemic world of renewed geopolitical tensions, resurgent inflation, and rising interest rate pressures reshaped how real estate capital markets operate? How has hawkish monetary policy impacted CRE over the past year? Where is the CRE sector headed, and how can investors respond?

Here we explore the historical data as well as various theories and perspectives on CRE’s “new normal”. Above all, we consider what strategies may emerge for investors.

The era of “free money” is over, at least for now. The Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent fiscal and monetary stimulus efforts brought it to a close, if inadvertently, in late 2021 when US Core Consumer Price Index (CPI) growth – CPI excluding food and energy prices – exceeded 3 per cent per annum for the first time in nearly three decades.