CHICAGO—Even as Green Street Advisors reports that pricing on institutional-quality assets continued climbing in January and is now well above the 2007 peak, a Deloitte webcast Thursday predicted that values and prices have room to increase for another 12 to 18 months. “2015 will be one of the strongest years for commercial real estate since the credit crisis,” said panelist Ken Riggs, president of RERC, a Situs company.

That's in line with the expectations of the 2,600 industry members who tuned in for the hour-long webinar, based on the “Expectations & Market Realities in Real Estate 2015: Scaling New Heights” report issued this week by Deloitte, RERC and the National Association of Realtors. With moderator Bob O'Brien, vice chairman and US real estate services leader at Deloitte, calling the subtitle of this year's report “the most optimistic” he's seen, respondents to an online poll question also expected values to rise.

Their expectations of value increases were more moderate than bullish, though, with 50.4% of respondents saying they anticipate values to rise by 2% to 5% this year. However, the percentage of respondents who expect “robust strengthening” of 5% to 15% was up compared to last year, O'Brien noted.

Yet Riggs, citing data from a third-quarter Situs RERC survey of institutional investors, noted that the value vs. price rating has been trending downward for the past few quarters, as prices rose relative to valuations. Further, he cited a widening gap between availability and discipline when it comes to capital.

“We are at an inflection point,” said Riggs. “We are at a point where underwriting standards have begun to loosen,” albeit not to the same degree that marked deals done during the previous cycle's peak. Even so, he said a loosening of the standards warrants closer attention than pricing and values at this point. Riggs predicted that the gap between availability and discipline was likely to continue widening this year, especially if interest rates remain low.

Given the still-modest recovery in employment and consumer spending detailed by panelist George Ratiu, NAR's director of quantitative and commercial research, it's likely that a low-interest-rate environment will be with us for a while yet. “We expect continued improvement in economic conditions” this year, Ratiu said, although his presentation dovetailed with poll respondents' expectations for a gradual recovery in the economy and in commercial real estate fundamentals, rather than a dramatic uptick.

In view of that backdrop, O'Brien's colleague Matthew Kimmel offered a sector-by-sector forecast of what the rest of this year holds in store. Office will see the highest sales transaction volume this year, said Kimmel, principal with Deloitte Transactions and Business Analytics LLP. The sector's outlook will be “moderately positive” in '15, with vacancy nationwide expected to decline to 16.3% by year's end and asking rents to increase by 3.2%.

The strong demand for industrial is expected to continue, said Kimmel, as vacancies decline to 8.6%. About 71 million square feet of new space will come on line by the end of '15.