SANTA BARBARA, CA—Saying “it's different this time” has long been a surefire way to elicit a laugh with an audience of commercial real estate professionals.

After all, there are few things more certain than the cyclicality of the industry. Many of today's leaders cut their teeth by finding profit in the S&L crisis in the early 1990s. So ingrained are cycles that a common way of denoting time is to reference the series of busts that follow the booms: the Russian bond crisis, 9/11, the global financial crisis, etc.

Today, eight years into a slow-moving recovery in which commercial real estate has outperformed most every other investment class, the discussion is moving from whether the sector is overdue for a correction to how long the recovery will run and whether the industry has finally learned the lessons of past mistakes.