Investors are coming back to the real estate market, reversing a slowdown over the past few years.
Market conditions saw significant recuperation in the first half of 2025, according to a report from commercial real estate brokerage and advisory firm Avison Young.
The Toronto company recorded 536 real estate transactions totaling $13.5 billion in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro — an 89% increase from the previous year.
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D-FW Real Estate News
During the first half of 2025, investment in new development sites experienced a 680% increase in transaction volume from the previous year, totaling $2.25 billion.
Investment in apartment complexes surged by nearly 140%, taking the lion’s share of volume transacted in the first half of 2025, $6.3 billion.
Even office and retail transactions have seen volume growth, with only industrial investment experiencing a decline.
“The story in Dallas is how active multifamily has been,” said Erik Edeen, senior director of U.S. investment sales at Avison Young.
For the past few years, high interest rates have sidelined investors. Rental rates were also driven down by a market that overbuilt during the pandemic, delivering a one-two punch to commercial real estate investment.
Instead, investors turned to more appealing, less risky prospects — like U.S. Treasury bonds.
That’s set to change, however, as the market self-rights.
“Deliveries are supposed to be dropping off by close to 70% next year, there are much fewer starts, so investors are acting now and saying ‘OK, I’m willing to take what looks to be a fairly tight cap rate, but if you look at years 2 and 3 of the investments, I think the yields will pop,’ ”Edeen said.
Essentially, investors are counting on a dearth of supply to begin driving rental rates back up and allowing properties to grow in value.
Although the numbers are encouraging, Edeen warned that the market is still in the process of gathering the momentum it lost in the back half of 2022, after interest rate hikes tanked investors’ appetite for commercial real estate.
“We’re still only 48% to where we were in 2021,” Edeen said. “I think the trend has a lot of room to grow. There’s a lot more capital that can be deployed, and a lot of capital being thawed as we speak.”