It's tough not to get discouraged when the news you hear seems unrelentingly dour. The year-over-year drops in transaction volume have been a regular negative drumbeat, though there's more subtlety in events than the headline numbers make clear.

Not that everything is secretly roses, but, as MSCI wrote, "The headline figures for deal volume growth in February paint a bleaker picture than the reality. Deal structure has clouded recent trends in growth, with one-off entity-level deals pushing activity above trends last month and a year ago. Still, conditions are not great, and even looking past the impact of entity-level deals, investment activity fell in February."

In other words, conditions are still volatile and even chaotic. Investors and developers keep waiting for growing levels of transactions to help pricing discovery so they feel safe in reentering markets, but they need to reenter markets to increase levels of transactions to enable that discovery. Currently, it's a positive feedback loop, which in systems theory ends up a negative thing, like stomping on a car's accelerator instead of the break when the vehicle is speeding toward a brick wall.