NEW YORK CITY—A casual observer could be excused for concluding that entity-level transactions and huge portfolio buys are dominating the investment sales market. Consider that mega-deals for the Blackstone Group's IndCor industrial business and the merger of Washington Prime and Glimcher Realty Trust closed in the first quarter, and Q2 thus far has been highlighted by announcements that include GE Capital's $23-billion real estate sale to Blackstone and Wells Fargo as well as the $5.9-billion joint venture between Prologis and Norges Investment Group to acquire KTR Capital and, most recently, the $2.5-billion sale of Associated Estates Realty Corp. to a Brookfield Asset Management affiliate.

But are they dominating the scene, in a way that ominously suggests a repeat of the run-up to the Global Financial Crisis? Not so, says Real Capital Analytics in its Q1 Big Picture overview.

“While portfolio and entity-level transactions were important in the last two quarters, these large deals are still a smaller portion of the market than what was seen in the last market run-up,” according to RCA. Across the span of 2007, these deals represented 48.3% of all transaction volume, with their share of volume running as high as 53% in some quarters. Although such deals accounted for 38% of overall dollar volume in Q1, the general trend over the past few quarters has been closer to 30%.

In addition, RCA says, '07's entity-level deals represented “a generally one-way flow of capital. Just under 72% of all transac