Canadian commercial real estate assets are comparatively less exposed to the dire physical threats that extreme weather poses or has already served up in other global regions.

A ten-year run of capital growth abruptly reversed, resulting in a 7.8 per cent loss of value across the 2,356 assets that the 44 portfolios represented in the Canada Annual Property Index hold.

Newly released 2020 investment results find industrial and multifamily assets on the positive side of the national average total return for 2,356 directly held standing assets, which registered -4.1 per cent.

Commercial real estate investors, owners and managers are acknowledging that entrenched social inequities undermine their workforces, their tenants and the value of their portfolios.

Industrial availability tightened from the third quarter in eight of the 11 surveyed markets, ending the year at well below 2 per cent in Vancouver and Montreal and below 1 per cent in Toronto.

Multifamily and industrial properties are routinely lumped together as favoured investment assets, but asset managers face divergent degrees of difficulty when they seek to mine value from energy performance.

More than 50 per cent of participating Canadian portfolios were grouped in the top two brackets of results, with 11 earning 5-star status and six attaining a 4-star rating.

Beyond stores selling essential goods, bricks-and-mortar retail is reeling from COVID-19-triggered public health controls and watching its already gaining competition grow even faster than projected.

Canada has a numerically slight presence with disproportionate weight in Lee & Associates’ newly released third quarter commercial real estate results.

The bulk of findings in the newly released Altus Group Global Property Development Trends Report are tied to opinions collected in early 2020 before COVID-19’s full hit landed in the world’s commercial real estate markets.

Proposals address a range of issues that are likely to be of interest to listed real estate entities and their investors, as well as start-up ventures and other publicly traded service providers to the industry.

Under COVID-19-induced pressure, investors, lenders and public markets are signalling a preference for multifamily assets. The asset class was the top attractor of investment dollars in Canada’s commercial real estate market during the first half of 2020.

Market analysts typify a second quarter uptick in downtown sublet activity as a spurt, not a glut. However, they project the trend is likely to continue.

Canada once again places in the top tier of “highly transparent” nations in the newly released 2020 edition of the JLL/LaSalle Global Real Estate Transparency Index.

Results of a wide-ranging survey show many major Canadian commercial real estate players braced for the erosion of consumer confidence, tenant solvency and their own investment returns.

Thus far, in most markets, there’s been no spurt of office sublets or rent discounts that conventionally signify an economic downturn, but there has been a flurry of conjecture about the forces COVID-19 may have unleashed.

Commercial real estate operators are seeking advice across a wide spectrum of expertise as they deploy their crisis management, business continuity and recovery plans.