It’s no secret that investment activity and transaction volume across all commercial real estate sectors have stalled over the past several years. But as is the usual case with CRE, a great deal depends on asset type, geographic sector and—according to a recent CBRE brief—deal size.

The brief said that, for the most part, the rising cost of capital has impacted predominantly larger deals. There is, however, a caveat to this. In analyzing the MSCI Real Capital Analytics database of trades by quartile versus specific size, the CBRE analysts discovered the following:

• For industrial, the volume decline for the largest-deal quartile was 7.3 percentage points higher than for the smallest quartile.

• The gap between largest-deal and smallest-deal quartiles for multifamily was 9.1 percentage points.

• The retail sector defied this trend, showing a steeper volume decline for the smallest deal quartile versus the largest.

• Office showed a 15-percentage-point gap between the smallest and largest quartiles. “This is not surprising as the well-chronicled challenges in securing financing for office buildings drove investors to prefer small, lower-leverage deals,” the brief said.

In office deals, the brief said that an improvement in capital markets could lead to “an even starker difference between well-occupied, high-value office properties and underperforming secondary and tertiary assets.” The brief noted that this should possibly encourage more trading in larger, top-tier assets.