Here's How The Biggest Players Moved The Commercial Real Estate Market In 2025

The long freeze of commercial real estate sales volume thawed in 2025, with dealmakers grinding ahead despite pervasive uncertainty to capitalize on opportunities in a shifting market.

Investors spent more than $255B buying properties across the four core sectors of multifamily, office, industrial and retail real estate in 2025, a Bisnow analysis of CoStar sales data for U.S. properties that traded for at least $10M found.

Market momentum built throughout the year across every sector, as each quarter saw higher sales volume than the last. 

“It's really exciting to see that all the asset classes are firing on all cylinders here, and there's a tremendous amount of momentum in the market,” said James Nelson, Avison Young’s head of U.S. investment sales. 

Buyers have been helped by the Federal Reserve’s interest rate cuts last year and the moderation of yields on the U.S. bonds that are used to benchmark loan rates. The positive developments helped investors push through the economic fog of a tariff-driven trade war to close deals. 

There’s a quiet dissonance present across the broader economy — consumer confidence is 20% lower than a year ago, but the index still bounced back to a five-month high in January — that’s just as present among the investor class. 

President Donald Trump’s push to remake global trade, launch a historic deportation campaign and reshuffle energy policy priorities will all have long-term impacts on commercial real estate assets. But today’s buyers aren’t worried, Nelson said.   

“I don't want to be, you know, Pollyannish, but we're not hearing a lot of investors speak about these long-term concerns,” he said. The business case is there today, so buyers aren’t waiting to see what happens with trade spats, the rise of artificial intelligence or geopolitical fights to close a deal.

“Investors are kind of locking in these bets now, they're seeing the opportunity now,” he said. 

The top 10 buyers in each sector — four corporate giants appear across multiple sectors — spent a combined $39B and accounted for 15% of total investment activity in 2025. Bisnow dug into the data to tease out the biggest moves from the largest market players and explore what they say about the shifting ground in each sector.

Multifamily

Investors spent $115B on multifamily transactions worth more than $10M in 2025, accounting for roughly 45% of all capital deployed across the four core sectors, according to CoStar.

The top 10 buyers in the space spent a combined $14B, led by $2.2B in acquisitions from San Francisco-based private investment firm FPA Multifamily and rounded out by North Carolina-based Bell Partners in the 10th spot with $901M in purchases. 

FPA claimed the top position through one-off purchases of individual properties or small portfolio deals. Recent acquisitions include spending $97M to buy The Gateway at Malden Center in Massachusetts that had been owned by Equity Residential, the seventh most active seller of the year. 

It also paid $73M for a pair of apartment buildings in Baltimore in September and spent $76M in November buying seven properties spread across the Twin Cities region.  

Just behind FPA was multifamily giant Cortland, which spent $1.9B buying assets in 2025 while also bringing in $1.1B through property sales. The Atlanta-based firm didn’t spend the year on one-off acquisitions, instead making a $1.6B deal in August to acquire 19 properties from Elme Communities.

The transaction earned Elme, formerly WashREIT, third place on the list of top sellers. The Bethesda, Maryland-based firm first said it was exploring a potential sale in February after management concluded that the stock was undervalued. The Cortland deal is part of a total liquidation effort that management hopes to complete by midyear. 

Aimco, another REIT that’s decided to sell assets and close shop, ranks fifth among sellers. 

Apollo Global Management joined multifamily operators in the top buyers category, ranking seventh with $1B spent. California State Teachers Retirement System was also one of the busiest buyers with $1.5B in assets purchased.

The mix of individual deals, portfolio trades and company acquisitions reflects investors’ growing interest in the sector as the wave crests on the pandemic-era apartment construction boom, said Alex Ern, Avison Young’s senior manager for U.S. capital markets research. 

“It's a vote of confidence in the sector,” he said. “It's fair to say that it's probably never been harder to buy a home than it is right now — I say that as somebody who's in the market to do that — but that's obviously then a positive thing if you're an investor, as it relates to rent growth.”

Industrial 

Industrial assets were a distant second in the race to attract capital, with $61.9B in sales across 2025. 

The top 10 buyers purchased $12.8B worth of the total, spending just over 20% of all investment dollars, with EQT AB far and away the busiest buyer. 

The Swedish private equity giant spent $2.7B on industrial assets in 2025, $883M more than the second most active buyer, Ares Management Corp., another private equity heavy hitter that made a $2.1B deal including debt to acquire Plymouth Industrial REIT in October. 

EQT raised a $5B fund targeting U.S. industrial real estate in 2023 and announced early last year it would offload 34 multifamily properties, exit life sciences investments and reposition itself as a pure-play industrial investor.

As part of the reorganization, EQT rolled its separate real estate investment subsidiary, EQT Exeter, into its primary business and CEO Per Franzen said in October it was planning to buy $250B in U.S. industrial assets over the next five years. 

Four of the top 10 buyers in 2025 were purely focused on industrial properties, with EQT joined by NorthPoint Development, LBA Realty and Prologis, the world's largest industrial landlord, which ranked seventh for acquisitions. The latter two firms also show up as top sellers, with LBA selling $767M in industrial assets last year and Prologis shedding $721M worth of properties, according to CoStar data. 

The rest of the buyers leaderboard is dominated by financial firms and private equity. Just behind Ares is Morgan Stanley with $1.5B spent, with Blackstone a close fourth at $1.4B. Norway’s Norges Bank Investment Management, the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, ranked sixth on the back of an $800M investment into Blackstone’s closed-end core-plus North American logistics fund in May.

Blackstone was by far the largest seller of industrial assets in 2025, shedding $4.6B worth of properties, four times more than any other firm, according to CoStar sales data.  

By the middle of last year, the investment giant and its Link Logistics subsidiary had sold more than $1B worth of properties in South Florida alone. It added another $426M in sales through a portfolio deal in September. 

Office

Avison Young tracked a 13% rise in office investment sales year-over-year in 2025, with CoStar capturing $47.2B in transaction volume above $10M across the year. Owner-users dominate the top buyers list in 2025, and just one firm, tech giant Apple, spent more than $1B on space.

In all, the top 10 buyers accounted for 13% of sales volume, and Apple's outlay came across multiple deals around its existing offices. In December, the tech giant acquired two office buildings it already occupies in Cupertino, California, in a $216M all-cash deal that followed the $167M purchase of three office buildings in the same city in June.  

It also paid $350M for a two-building Sunnyvale complex and $167M for a property a few blocks from its Silicon Valley headquarters, according to CoStar and reported by The Real Deal. 

Also in California, Pacific Gas and Electric took the second spot as a top buyer with its $906M purchase of its 910K SF headquarters in Oakland. PG&E says the acquisition will cut its real estate operating costs and ultimately save customers money. 

The move was part of a broader consolidation of offices that started in 2021 and PG&E says will save ratepayers $400M in the five years ending in December 2026. Bay Area developer TMG Partners sold the property, giving the firm third place for office dispositions last year. 

Amazon and Cornell University also spent more than $500M each on office space, according to CoStar data.

The spate of owner-user deals was something of a unique and waning side effect of the pandemic, with office pricing looking attractive for tenants seeking to expand into and around their existing offices at the same time that space availability remains historically elevated. 

“If an end user is going to buy an office building to use, they need to have some vacant floors. So this phenomenon would not have occurred if there wasn’t vacancy, which leads to distress and discounted pricing,” Avison Young’s Nelson said. 

The State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio tops the sellers list with its $1.1B deal to part with 590 Madison Ave. in New York. RXR, the private buyer of the 1M SF tower, isn’t among the top 10 buyers of office buildings in the CoStar data. 

At the time of the deal, the New York-based real estate firm said it had partnered with Elliott Investment Management on the acquisition, backed with financing from Apollo Global Management. 

Retail

The retail sector was defined by resiliency in 2025, with vacancy at historic lows and asking rents growing nationally despite shaky consumer confidence and high-profile tenant bankruptcies from the likes of Rite Aid, Joann and Forever 21. 

The 10 most active buyers spent $5.4B picking up properties, roughly 15% of overall annual activity, with interest in the stable returns from net lease assets helping drive volume. 

RCG Ventures, the real estate investment arm of Atlanta private equity firm Argonne Capital Group, topped the buyers list through a single $1.8B deal with REIT Global Net Lease for a portfolio of 59 retail assets. RCG was backed by Koch Real Estate Investments and funds from Goldman Sachs and Ares in the deal. 

Simon Property Group, the biggest owner of malls in the U.S., ranked second for acquisitions with $721M spent, largely through the $512M purchase of the Brickell City Centre mall in Miami from John Swire & Sons, the fifth-ranked seller of retail assets. 

Strategic Value Partners shed $1.4B worth of assets in 2025, more than any other landlord, through a series of deals. It sold four grocery-anchored properties and a land parcel to Brixmor Property Group for $212M, the 317K SF Georgia Crossing to Invesco for $82M, and brought in $61M for the Orange Park Mall in Florida. 

Along with net lease deals, investors looking for an opportunity promising stable returns have turned to grocery-anchored retail centers in 2025, a trend that’s likely to roll into 2026. Boston-based Bain Capital announced in December it raised $1.6B with investment firm 11North to target the asset class. 

“There is good debt for [retail deals], especially what's going on in the CMBS space, and so you start looking at this and saying that this is a sector of the market where you can really get an outsized cash-on-cash return,” Nelson said.