Much of the discussion about commercial real estate through and after the formal pandemic has been a triptych. The asset classes include office, multifamily, and industrial. The first one quickly tumbled. The second and third were investment darlings. Retail was assumed to be on a crash-and-burn trajectory with extended and sustained pandemic closings.

Now? Retail is looking pretty good, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution. A start to the story is retail having done surprisingly well during the pandemic while office did poorly. And multifamily — assumed to be an impossibly steady investment because people need to live somewhere, and houses are expensive — had comparable losses.

Using data from CoStar, Brookings noted that while CRE values usually move roughly in step, from 2019 to 2024, that has not held true. Office fell from $3.17 trillion to $2.43 trillion, a drop of $740 billion, or 23.3%. Multifamily went from $4.91 trillion up to an exaggerated height valuation beyond any other class of about $6.1 trillion. Then the asset class slid to $4.61 trillion. The end-to-end drop was $300 billion, or about 6.1%. But the drop from the high point to current value was almost $1.5 trillion, or roughly a 24.4% drop, a bigger dip than office.