Originally published by Tejaswi Ponnada Parker on August 28, 2020.
The second-quarter contraction in commercial real estate (CRE) capital markets evokes memories of the significant liquidity and price discovery challenges encountered during the global financial crisis (GFC). However, the two crises share little else in common, at least up to this point. While the GFC indiscriminately impacted volumes and pricing across commercial property types as a result of the significant financial market stress, the impact of the pandemic on capital markets thus far has been more selective, widening the gulf between “winner” and “loser” property types. We begin with a brief overview and then dive into a cross-sectional and time-series comparison at the aggregate sector, sub-sector, and market level, in a bid to identify trends and understand investor risk sentiment.
Second-quarter 2020 volumes per Real Capital Analytics (RCA) reported the steepest year-over-year (YoY) decline in any single quarter since the GFC recovery. Over the last 10 years — the longest economic expansion in U.S. history — annual deal volumes steadily increased. They first peaked in 2015, a record year of deal-making for large-scale portfolio and entity-level transactions, before reaching an all-time high[1] of $592 billion in 2019. Transaction volume is often a barometer of liquidity in capital markets—and individual, portfolio and entity sales all reported a steep contraction in the second quarter this year. But how does liquidity today compare with that observed during the GFC, and more importantly, are these trends here to stay?