Commercial property prices are rising again, but the latest Green Street readings show a market that remains cautious and deeply uneven. For owners, lenders and investors, the data suggests the hard reset is mostly behind them, yet a broad-based rally is still out of reach.
In April, Green Street's all-property Commercial Property Price Index slipped 0.1%, even though the index is 3.1% higher than it was a year ago. That small monthly decline hides a bigger story: almost nothing moved in April except life science, which was the only segment to register a price drop. Every other major sector in the index was flat for the month, a pattern that has become common as buyers and sellers feel their way toward a new clearing price.
The tone from investors helps explain why. "Buyers have been disciplined," said Peter Rothemund, co-head of strategic research at Green Street.
"Rent growth in many sectors is uninspiring, and investors are facing a 10-year Treasury in the mid-4s. That's not much to get excited about." In other words, capital is there, but it is not willing to stretch on either growth assumptions or exit yields just to get deals done.
The current price level also indicates where the market is in the cycle. The all-property CPPI sits at 130.9, roughly 16% below its 2022 peak. Core sectors — apartments, industrial, office and retail — are down about 18% from their highs, even though that core basket has climbed 3% over the past 12 months. Rather than a sharp comeback, the numbers point to a slow, incremental recovery off a deep correction.
Beneath the surface, some sectors appear to be rebuilding momentum while others are still working through past excesses. Strip retail and data centers have each posted 6% price gains over the past year, putting them near the top of Green Street's rankings.
Health care values are up 5% over the same period despite a 0.7% decline in April and both student housing and manufactured home parks have gained 4%. Those kinds of increases, after earlier pullbacks, suggest investors see reasonably solid cash flows and feel they are being paid for today's interest-rate backdrop.
Office tells a different story. Prices have risen 4% over the past 12 months but remain 35% below their 2022 peak. That gap implies that national index gains do not mean the asset class is out of the woods; instead, markets seem to be separating assets that have already repriced from those where structural risk is still not fully reflected.
In retail, mall values are up 1% over the past year and sit 6% below their peak, while strip centers have climbed 6% and are also 6% off their high, pointing to a sector that has largely repriced and returned to trading on local fundamentals.
Green Street's longer history of the index shows this phase more as a recalibration than the start of a new boom. Over the past seven years, industrial, self‑storage and manufactured housing have still shown outsized cumulative appreciation, even after recent giveback. Office stands out on the downside, while net lease and self‑storage sit well below their peaks after years in which yields compressed too far and then adjusted quickly. That backdrop argues for focusing on where relative value still exists rather than trying to ride a general upturn.
Another signal comes from the way the index is constructed. Because the CPPI is based on unlevered values implied by Green Street's REIT net asset value models, it tends to capture where prices are being negotiated for institutional‑quality assets now, not where they closed months ago.
The recent pattern — tiny month-to-month changes, modest gains over the year and wide sector dispersion — suggests public and private markets are slowly converging on a new set of assumptions for cap rates and growth, but only in selected corners of the market.
If that pattern continues, 2026 may go down as the year when commercial real estate values stopped falling broadly and started sorting themselves out sector by sector. For executives, the takeaway is that while capital is still willing to back credible income stories, it is no longer willing to pay yesterday's multiples for them.
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