(This is the first of a series of stories that will appear throughout the summer as GlobeSt.com celebrates 15 years of commercial real estate reporting.)

NEW YORK CITY—The past 15 years' macroeconomic backdrop for GlobeSt.com, and the commercial real estate industry it covers, has resembled the world's largest and longest rollercoaster track. That track was on an upward incline when this daily news website launched in July 2000; as of the first quarter of the following year it was headed downward at a pretty steep angle.

Headlines in the early weeks of GlobeSt.com's history reflected forward momentum at the local level: the tech sector gravitating toward Fairfield County, CT, for example, and an office construction boom in Orange County, CA. By the following February, though, Timothy H. Callahan, the then-president and CEO of Equity Office Properties Trust, was sounding a note of caution about the year to come. On his company's fourth-quarter earnings call, Callahan noted that although his REIT's exposure to the tech industry was low, its portfolio had been affected by the shakeout in the dot-com sector, especially in San Francisco and Seattle.

Meanwhile, in the same Fairfield County office market that saw an influx of tech tenants in '00, the effects of a pullback were being felt. “It will be harder to bring new product out of the ground in light of the economic uncertainty in the market,” Jim Fagan, senior managing director for CBRE's New York tri-state suburban offices, told GlobeSt.com in March 2001. “This will mitigate the appearance of sublease space that will be coming on the market, and the possible slowdown in activity from what we've had in the past.”

Conversely, the economic downturn proved beneficial to the multifamily sector—as it would in the aftermath of the housing bubble and global recession less than a decade later. GlobeSt.com reported in February '01 that Q4 occupancy was up year over year as apartment dwellers shelved plans to buy single-family homes. “A continued strong performance in Q4 '00 was encouraging,” MPF Research editorial director Greg Willett told GlobeSt.com. “More economic uncertainty probably helped apartment communities retain residents during the past few months.”

Even so, by comparison to previous down cycles—the early 1990s, for example—the 2001 recession was relatively mild. Nonetheless, the dot-com bust took its toll on the office market, as did the aftermath of 9/11 on travel and tourism. The annual Emerging Trends in Real Estate report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, issued a few weeks after 9/11, predicted that the “nadir” of the cycle would occur in 2002. However, the report stated, “A potent combination of public market discipline, low interest rates and controlled supply have kept real estate markets in relative equilibrium—ready to withstand reduced demand from the expected recessionary fallout.”

By 2003, the rollercoaster track was on an upward trajectory again, and each of the following years would surpass the one before it. In early 2007, for instance, Marcus & Millichap predicted that the domestic investment sales market for that year would exceed what the industry saw in 2006. This prediction proved to be accurate, as US commercial property sales hit $489.6 billion in '07. CMBS issuance hit a record $230 billion the same year, and, as GlobeSt.com blogger Sam Chandan reminded us recently, commercial loan exposure across all US banks increased at an average year-over-year rate of more than 9% between 2004 and 2008.

Globally, property markets were on the rise as well. To cite one metric, GlobeSt.com in early '07 reported a CBRE study showing annual rent growth in each of the world's 10 major business locations, led by Hong Kong with a 30% gain Y-O-Y to an average $75.90 per square foot. Ward Caswell, CBRE's US director of research, told GlobeSt.com that “for the first time we are seeing all the global markets in sync on the uptick for both vacancy and rents. That has been aligning for the last couple years and now we are seeing the acceleration phase.” Rental increases in the 10 major markets, he said, spoke to the overall strength of the global economy and signaled good times ahead for investors, owners and landlords.

Yet there were early signs of the upheaval to come, with economist Nouriel Roubini predicting a global recession as far back as 2006. By the fall of '07, the so-called subprime housing crisis had shaken homebuyers' confidence, and commercial real estate was beginning to feel the effects. However, industry concern was not yet widespread when GlobeSt.com reported on a November '07 panel discussion cosponsored by the Roosevelt University Chicago School of Real Estate. Expressing a then-common belief, Marks Attwood, president of the residential development division of Amcore Bank, said the subprime “crisis” was not nearly as bad as it was being portrayed. “I think it is a media phenomenon,” he said.

The following year would show that high delinquencies among subprime mortgage borrowers were only the tip of the iceberg. By September of '08, three of Wall Street's five major investment banks had collapsed, with Lehman Brothers making the largest bankruptcy declaration in US history. The nation's largest savings bank, Washington Mutual, also fell, its assets being sold to JP Morgan Chase. And the federal government began implementing the first of several large-scale, and controversial, measures to shore up the domestic economy with the Troubled Assets Relief Program. Globally, Roubini's pessimism from two years earlier was borne out.

Even as TARP got underway, GlobeSt.com reported in early 2009 on PwC's quarterly survey of real estate investors, which suggested that taking advantage of troubled-asset sales would be “quite challenging for many buyers. First, the bid-ask pricing gap remains very wide between buyers and sellers. Second, ascertaining where prices lie remains very difficult due to a decline in sales activity. Third, financing options remain scarce. And lastly, and probably most importantly, the confidence and trust exuded by investors during the recent expansion has been lost and will take some time to be found again.”

Over the six-and-a-half years since that report was issued, most of these challenges have been addressed, gradually, by the market. Investors have regained their confidence, buoyed in large measure by plentiful availability of debt from a variety of sources. As for sales activity, Real Capital Analytics reported in May that domestic transactions were up 49% for Q1 2015, fueled partly by a record quarterly level of cross-border investment in US property.

However, industry experts still see a widespread pricing gap—not between the expectations of sellers and buyers, but between prices and the underlying real estate fundamentals. That's the case especially in view of what is generally considered the slowest recovery of any post-World War II recession. Yet there's an upside to that gradual uptick, as Colliers International's chief economist, Andrew Nelson, made clear during a media briefing this past spring. “I'm not saying this is a perfect economy, because it's not,” he told reporters. “But for commercial real estate, it's about as good as it gets.”

By that he meant that it's good enough to drive improvements in property fundamentals, but not so vigorous to pose the risk of overheating—or overbuilding. Aside from multifamily, new supply in most sectors is at a fraction of long-term norms, and even apartment construction is no more than those norms would dictate. As for demand, Nelson said it's picking up, but “the best years are yet to come.”