The sale of a 50% stake in the Fashion Show Mall in Las Vegas was Q3's largest single-asset deal.

NEW YORK CITY—By deal type, it was in individual assets that commercial property sales volume saw year-over-year growth in the third quarter, Real Capital Analytics said Thursday. The 2% Y-O-Y gain in sales of these assets was offset, though, by a 15% drop in portfolio and entity-level transactions.

That being said, even a modest Y-O-Y gain represents an improvement in a year that to date has seen annual declines. Q3 volume overall was down by 2% from the year-ago period, representing a moderation in the pace of the falling off: in Q1 the Y-O-Y decline was 17%.

By property type, transaction volume was up on a Y-O-Y basis in a number of sectors, including apartments. The multifamily sector also represents the only one with year-to-date improvement in sales volume compared to the first three quarters of 2015: 11%, for a YTD date of $111.5 billion.